Am I the a-hole? Doctors office sent me to collections

Just left the eye doctor and had a little drama in the waiting room. I show up 5 minutes early to my appointment and check in and they tell me I’m carrying a balance. I say OK obviously I’ll pay it right now. As far as I know I haven’t received any kind of bill. They said they can’t do that, it’s in collections and I’ll have to pay them + a fee. Once they mention the fee I get more stern and say I’ve never received a bill or a phone call or anything indicating I have an outstanding balance. They asked if I’ve moved recently and I told them I did last year and hadn’t given them my new address, so that part is definitely on me. We get the new address squared away and at this point I’m asking them why would they send me to collections and not just give me a phone call and avoid all of this.

This is a small town doctors office, and not a huge hospital. Their response was “we’re not obligated to call you if you don’t respond to a paper bill”. Hearing this response raised my blood pressure for sure. I told them I understand there’s a minimum standard of notification but maybe I want to go to a doctors office where the staff does more than just the required minimum. Then the 3 receptionists there get snippy and say if I wanted to do that they wouldn’t miss me as a patient. I actually laughed when I heard that a little because it’s a bit odd that a receptionist would be actively denying business at a place where she is an employee and not an owner. At this point they tell me I need to call collections before I can see the doctor. I ask them “could you have called ahead and given me a phone call to let me know I needed to take care of this ahead of time?” Crickets. Again saying they’re not required to alert me.

After this back and forth I go outside to call collections and the lady on the phone asks point blank why I was sent to her as there is no record of my account being sent to collections. I go back inside and tell them this and they look dumbfounded, and then they immediately accept payment from me directly which they had refused before and said they weren’t capable of.

I was definitely a little stern once I heard I was in collections and understand I was in the wrong technically by not giving them my new address. However obviously they didn’t have their own house in order given they hadn’t actually sent me to collections when they thought they had. Is it too much to ask before sending someone to collections, a little heads up phone call? A 2 minute phone call would’ve saved all of this hassle not to mention whatever fees or credit dings come from being sent to collections. AND THEN they didn’t even give me a heads up before that they wouldn’t see me without resolving this issue ahead of time so I had to do it right there in the lobby and have my appointment pushed.

All of this came immediately after dealing with health insurance because my wife has been paying premiums but apparently BCBS is saying her account has been canceled for several months. We found this out when she had a slew of claims denied for seemingly no reason or change in our plan/payments. So I was about done dealing with medical BS when I walked in the door.

Am I the a-hole here?