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WELD COUNTY, Colo -- Booking an appointment for a COVID-19 antibody test was pretty easy, but when Denise Shoaf decided to cancel, she soon found out it would be difficult to get a refund.
Shoaf made appointments for her husband and daughter but after a conversation with their doctor, she decided against getting tested. She canceled the appointments within three hours of booking them but when she received her credit card statement, she found out she had still been charged.
"When I got my credit card statement a month later it was on there and I said, 'What, we didn’t even get anything for that, how can they do that?'" said Shoaf.
She was charged more than $400 for the three antibody tests even though she received a confirmation email stating the appointments had been canceled. As Shoaf began researching the charge, she found out there was an additional step she needed to take beyond canceling the appointment.
"Well, sure enough at the very bottom it says canceling your appointment is not good enough, you need to cancel your order and here’s how you do it and there was how many steps, over 10 steps and if you weren’t clever on the internet there was no way you were going to get to that order," said Shoaf.
Shoaf said she spent quite a bit of time on the phone and online trying to figure out how to cancel the order. She finally figured out how to cancel the order and requested a refund but she still didn't received all of her money back.
"No, no they kept $20 for each of us so they have $60 of ours and we got nothing for that except a headache," said Shoaf.
When asked why Shoaf didn't get a full refund, a spokesperson for Quest Diagnostics released the following statement:
When a patient purchases a test from QuestDirect, a physician through our network at PWN reviews the purchase and orders the test on behalf of the patient (it is not legal for a patient to directly order the test). The patient may recall that she filled out a questionnaire in order to be approved. That questionnaire was reviewed by a physician. So, while she did not have her specimen collected or the test performed, she still engaged our third party physician network, and that’s why she was charged the administrative fee, which was paid to PWN.
