What can I do to pay an over whelming medical bill?
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80’s Girl asked:
I have over 36,000 in medical bills, I have not attempted to make payment because I simply do not have the money, now these bills are on my credit report. What can I do????
Vertical Vinyl Siding
I have over 36,000 in medical bills, I have not attempted to make payment because I simply do not have the money, now these bills are on my credit report. What can I do????
Vertical Vinyl Siding
June 16th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Send what you can. 5 dollars a month is enough to show you are trying. Meantime go the hospital and fill out financial aid forms. In many instances if you have little or no income they can help you. They may even write the whole thing off.
It is subsidized by federal and state grants which are paid for by tax dollars.
So see we, already have a national insurance plan. Our tax dollars already go to the less fortunate. So why are people fighting this healthcare thing so much.
June 18th, 2010 at 11:22 am
first, if you’re almost anywhere in America, you need to know that these bills are seriously bloated — way beyond reality.
Hospitals regularly settle their gross bills with private insurance companies for 25 to 30 cents on the dollar. They settle with Medicare/Medicaid for about 20 cents on the dollar.
Physicians are usually less gouging — their bills are only discounted 40% or so with insurance companies and 50% with Medicare/Medicaid.
Other service providers are frequently worse than the hospitals — overall, the laboratory operations are probably the worst, regularly settling for 12 to 15 cents on the dollar. Imaging outfits [scans] are maybe between hospitals and physicians.
So, what you do is …
1. bargain with all of them at once. Tell them point blank that the sum of all the bills is 36k and that you can’t pay that much. also tell them that you know they regularly take less from insurance companies and ask them for what you want — if that’s paying 12k to settle the whole thing and you can borrow the 12k — great.
2. the deal has to be that all the providers are in this together. if any one of them refuses, you file for bankruptcy and the court decides who gets how much — after your attorney gets paid first, of course.
GL
June 20th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Easy…attempt to pay the bills. Paying something is better than hoping the debt will just go away. Call the doctor/hospital and see what they can do for you. This bill will ruin the next decade of your life if you continue to do nothing!
June 23rd, 2010 at 8:02 pm
You can always attempt to settle them, but without settling, it’s too late to negotiate them downwards now.
June 24th, 2010 at 11:06 pm
You need to make some good faith payments. No payments can show bad faith. It does not have to be much. We just finished making medical payments this week on Leukemia treatment which started in 2007. Our problem was with the insurance company. This finally was cleaned up, but left us with a good share for our portion.
Our income is extremely low the last couple years since I work in the housing industry, but I have have assets in real estate. You can try negotiating, but usually when you have assets the amount will not go down. It still pays to ask though.
Depending upon income and assets there may also be financial aid through the hospital, doctors or organizations they know. But you need to work with them and no payment shows them that you are probably not doing so.