Her Sister Cost Their Family's Medical Practice $40,000, So She Doesn't Want To Hire Her To Come Back

Many people agree that you shouldn't try to work with friends or family. Boundaries between professional and personal relationships can quickly become blurred, and too often, the latter suffers.

But avoiding this reality becomes much more difficult when you're born into a family business. And upholding expectations for employees? That's a lot messier when they're your siblings.

Take this woman, for instance. She works in medicine and joined her father's practice about 20 years ago. The business has now been open for 51 years, and her sister, whom she refers to as "T," began working there around the same time.

However, her sister failed to do her job properly and wound up costing the practice a whopping $40,000! That's why she doesn't want to hire her sister back, but since they're family, her dad is urging her to reconsider.

For some background, she has essentially been running her dad's practice since he began working part-time eight years ago. She sees dozens of patients a day, meets with consultants, monitors their profits and losses, and tries to keep their expenses down.

Meanwhile, her sister was supposed to be handling insurance and patient billing. However, T does have multiple sclerosis (MS), and certain symptoms, such as anxiety and memory loss, have progressed in the last couple of years.

"And in August of last year, I noticed we weren't having as much money coming in. I couldn't figure it out because I was seeing plenty of patients," she recalled.

This led her to do some digging, and ultimately, she discovered the practice wasn't getting paid by Medicare. She instructed her sister to get to the bottom of it, and later, her sister claimed they were kicked off of Medicare because they never responded to some email requests for further information.

T promised that she never received those emails. Regardless, they were forced to re-credential with Medicare, which took around 45 days. And in the end, Medicare stated that the practice would not receive payment for the months of May to November.

nenetus - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only, not the actual people

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"We had to write off the balances for all the patients we saw then, to the tune of $40,000!" she revealed.

"We appealed to Medicare, and they sent us a statement of what had happened on their end. T ignored three emails with requests for updated information."

However, in July, her sister was hospitalized for nine days due to shingles meningitis. T's condition was serious, and her family thought she might die.

In fact, T had to receive an antiviral drug through an IV for 21 full days. Her sister also suffered permanent paralysis on one side of her face, which resulted in speech issues, and she had trouble walking.

Given all this, she truly didn't think her sister would even return to work at the practice. T received both short and long-term disability, and she figured that her sister would stay home from then on.

While T was recovering, she found out about even more insurance and patient billing issues, too. It turns out that her sister would simply write off balances if insurance companies didn't pay, rather than following up for more information and filing the claims again.

"T never sent statements to the patients, just wrote off anything over 90 days so it looked like we were getting paid when we weren't," she explained.

Obviously, this was a major financial oversight for the practice, and she didn't want her sister to come back to work. Unfortunately, though, her sister ended up wanting her position back anyway, so she tried to talk to her parents.

She told them that she didn't feel comfortable having T at the office anymore because she'd lied and cost them a ton of money. Nonetheless, her parents insisted that they were "family" and T wouldn't be able to get a job anywhere else.

"So she gets to come back to work and I have to oversee all the insurance billing to make sure there aren't any mistakes, like I have the time for that with 30 to 35 patients I see in a day," she vented.

Moreover, another staff member at the practice isn't thrilled about T coming back since they believe her sister is going to make the front desk a "toxic area."

But the real cherry on top? Her parents are seemingly reconsidering selling the practice to her after all. They're worried that, once she officially owns it, she'll just fire her sister.

"I'm fed up and frustrated with the whole situation, and I just want to quit. But I've got 20 years here, and I love my patients," she said.

Now, in the wake of all this drama, she's been left wondering whether not wanting to rehire her sister is really so unreasonable.

Does it sound like her sister is incapable of properly executing the responsibilities of her position? Should her sister be let go due to the $40,000 in losses? What would you do in her shoes? 

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