Happy New Year!
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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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.
Why would you have to pay it if they don't tell you the cost ahead of time? There's no contract.
Pretty normal to sign a document that says you are financially responsible for accrued charges.
Consider that when you walk into the ED with chest pain you can end up with a million dollar suite of cardiac surgery or thirty cents of tums and everyone has limited idea to predict which it is going to be ahead of time.
Wouldn't it make more sense for the hospitals to charge a flat rate for a given set of symptoms, tell you what that is upfront, and then take on the risk of whatever treatment you end up needing? The only downside is this gives the hospital an incentive to undertreat (although that's probably better than the current incentive to overtreat), but hospitals would have reputations and could potentially be sued for undertreating.
You'd think so and it's a fair question which is why I gave example somewhere else in this soup of comments. Elective procedures, stuff done at an outpatient surgery center, cosmetic things. Low rate of complications, low rate of fuck ups, pretty simple with a lower range of prices. Sure. Places will do that.
Hard to do for symptoms for so many reasons (is that headache a migraine, a stress headache, or a brain bleed? You are complaining about 8 things and the real problem is heart failure etc etc, the pain is referred and it's actually a very different kind of thing).
Once you've figured out what's going on it's feasible for some things, but the American population is really unhealthy and the one person where you open them up, find out it's bowel cancer and not appendicitis costs hundreds of times more than the regular appy.
It's the equivalent of those housing developments where everyone shares water fees but someone has a pool that they keep emptying and refilling every day.
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