Happy New Year!
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Notes -
I had to visit the emergency room earlier this year for a nose bleed. At the time I was discharged (October 2022) I paid a 200$ bill to the hospital, foolishly believing that this was the entire cost of the visit. I subsequently received a 357$ physicians statement. This little episode in medical billing really irritated me since I felt that the hospital had hidden the actual cost of their services and because the amount was absurd for the services rendered (10 minutes for a physicians assistant to apply some topical TCX). As a result I have been thinking of not paying it and am trying to understand if recent changes to that the credit reporting agencies have made may allow me to get away with this without damaging my >800 credit score.
In particular it sounds like medical debts < 500$ will no longer impact a credit score starting in 2023 https://www.equifax.com/personal/education/credit/score/can-medical-debt-impact-credit-scores/ and I am trying to determine if this determination is made based on the date of the service(s) (october 2022) or the date that a bill is sold to a collections entity, which could occur in late January. I also discovered that paid medical debt collections haven't impacted a consumers credit score since 2022 (https://investor.equifax.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1222/equifax-experian-and-transunion-support-u-s-consumers), so its my understanding that even if they are able to sell this bill to a collections entity, the worst that could happen is that I would simply have to pay the amount at a later time.
Does anyone know if this analysis is basically correct? Its my understanding that their only other recourse would be to try and sue me which is unlikely to happen over a 357$ bill.
You should get insurance, this is what it is for. If you have a plan but it has a super annoying deductible....well yes that's how it works (if you don't and you were cash pay you should call the billing department as the other user pointed out, and then get insurance).
I'm not sure if this will help but you should consider that (while it may appear superficially similar) medicine is not going to be like going to a mechanic. When you go to your dealership the work of analysis and diagnosis is often not paid for, then they'll tell you how much it is to fix the issue and you can take it or leave it. The cost is the labor and parts and replacement and repair. When you go to the emergency room you are paying the staff for the time and resources it takes to figure out what is going on. The treatment is often cheap (medicine, a splint, whatever) but the imaging, labs, and professional fees are time consuming and expensive. As a layman you aren't going to know what is going on under the hood (for instance in this case adults generally don't get nosebleeds that are bad enough to bring them to the hospital, so it could be because it's hella cold and dry outside, or it could be because the patient is having issues with clotting blah blah).
If you have chest pain and go to the ER, and after talking to you they give you tums and tell you to avoid spicy food the bill isn't for the tums it's for making sure you didn't have a heart attack.
You can see my responses below if you are interested in more details but I fundamentally don’t feel any moral obligation to a system where you have in network hospitals with out of network doctors.
Also it’s sort of stunning that americas credit bureaus appear to agree that the system is so exploitative that they simply ignore small
Amounts of medical debt when considering my probability of repaying other debt.
Do you believe health systems should be forced to provide care for someone who has no willingness and/or ability to pay? (They are - if you walk into an emergency room and say I will not pay for any care you provide me they are legally required to give you the same shit as anyone else).
If your response is "you know what I don't want any medical care" then my complaint is withdrawn, but otherwise it sounds like you want to "steal" because you don't like how the process works and don't have a lot of information about healthcare economics.*
*From your other post it sounds like you've been on the receiving end of a practice called surprise billing, which is controversial and legislated against in some jurisdictions but exists for a complicated and justifiable reason but is still annoying, as is usual the problem is health insurance companies being pretty much straight up evil and then blaming everyone else.
As for your frustration with medical debt, if people refuse to pay their medical bills all the hospitals go under and nobody gets medical care. I can understand you're frustrated but these things exist for a reason.
Having read through this whole thread, I wanted to say that I consider myself a strict capitalist in most things, but the whole industry of medical billing is so ridiculous for so many inscrutable reasons with everyone pointing fingers at each other that I find I'm unwilling to make any moral judgements at all for anything any particular patient chooses to do.
It is indeed pretty incredible that the situation is seen as ridiculous universally enough that the credit bureaus are now ignoring medical debt.
I don't know that I'm inclined or qualified to really defend any particular party in this mess. But I do notice that everyone seems to love to make the insurance companies the boogiemen. Aren't they all publicly traded though? If they're wildly profitable, can I invest in them and get some of that sweet healthcare cheat money? If not, well where's all the money going? What if they're just struggling to eke out some tiny profit while being constrained by an ever-changing maze of legislation and trying to juggle the conflicting demands of a dozen different groups, as the sole party with some responsibility to actually make the books balance somehow with the totality of everything that's going on?
Nothing about a market this regulated can really be described as capitalist. I don't understand how hard it is for people to draw the, to me, obvious line between level of regulation and dysfunction. Do people just think it's a coincidence that housing, medicine, schooling and banking are the industries everyone seems to constantly have problems with and costs seem absurd?
That's only if one believes that capitalism and regulation are somehow opposite to each other.
This so where the scope creep of what counts as "capitalism" makes the conversation impossible. The previous post seemed moderately in favor of "capitalism" so I interpreted as "relatively free markets". If we're going to switch to using the "cabal of capitalists control everything" then the response is "of course that's bad but it's never existed and no one would ever claim to be usually in favor of that".
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