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Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

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Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#171

Post by newsclues »

notch656a wrote: post #119
Clent wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming $1000 is easy to pay off. This is simply not true for the working poor.

$1000 is $2 / day for les than 2 years (if you can do math unlike commenter below, that's including nearly 20% APR). I'm sorry but even the poor in america can come up with some way to make $14 in a week, if nothing else by picking up some cans. I live in a city where a segment of impoverished people come up with ways to spend $20+ a day in fentanyl, and they don't seem to have much trouble coming up with that even w…

People live in tents because 100% of their income goes to opiates.

They can’t make more money and save it, because their needs will always exceed their income short of massive windfalls

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#172

Post by namdnay »

notch656a wrote: post #127
paxys wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative isn't denying care. It is providing the same care without having people get into debt, which every other developed country (and a lot of undeveloped countries) in the world manages to do.

So just redistributing the cost across the population? I think then you just end up with more people in debt, as their incomes fall to pay the tax.

except that you redistribute according to means, seeing as tax is correlated to income. so instead of having a random dice roll ("ah, you're working multiple low-hour jobs and you just got cancer? game over!"), you pay a bit more of your income as tax

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#173

Post by JaimeThompson »

notch656a wrote: post #119
Clent wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming $1000 is easy to pay off. This is simply not true for the working poor.

$1000 is $2 / day for les than 2 years (if you can do math unlike commenter below, that's including nearly 20% APR). I'm sorry but even the poor in america can come up with some way to make $14 in a week, if nothing else by picking up some cans. I live in a city where a segment of impoverished people come up with ways to spend $20+ a day in fentanyl, and they don't seem to have much trouble coming up with that even w…

14 per week might be the difference between eating ok and not eating.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#174

Post by fmakunbound »

willcipriano wrote: post #116

> Elizabeth Woodruff drained her retirement account and took on three jobs after she and her husband were sued for nearly $10,000 by the New York hospital where his infected leg was amputated. I'm not sure what sort of retirement they had planned to have on less than 10k, but it looks like in this case the hospital knew they could afford to pay but preferred not to. When people use number of jobs rather than hours wo…

Oh boy, think you might be living in a bubble.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#175

Post by kube-system »

culopatin wrote: post #136
notch656a wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1000 is $2 / day for les than 2 years (if you can do math unlike commenter below, that's including nearly 20% APR). I'm sorry but even the poor in america can come up with some way to make $14 in a week, if nothing else by picking up some cans. I live in a city where a segment of impoverished people come up with ways to spend $20+ a day in fentanyl, and they don't seem to have much trouble coming up with that even w…

Do you get your loans at 0% APR? Where do I sign?

Accounts Receivable at your local hospital.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#176

Post by chaps »

notch656a wrote: post #119
Clent wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming $1000 is easy to pay off. This is simply not true for the working poor.

$1000 is $2 / day for les than 2 years (if you can do math unlike commenter below, that's including nearly 20% APR). I'm sorry but even the poor in america can come up with some way to make $14 in a week, if nothing else by picking up some cans. I live in a city where a segment of impoverished people come up with ways to spend $20+ a day in fentanyl, and they don't seem to have much trouble coming up with that even w…

You're taking one person's experience, who has mild medical expenses and applying their situation to loads of poor people as if their experience exemplifies the experiences of millions. Frankly, that's disgusting and while I don't wish you awful medical debt, it sounds like you could stand to be humbled by some.

Think of bigger medical expenses over the same period -- 10k. That's 20/day. 100k -- 200/day. Now add ACA monthly costs (300-400/mo). Then rent, then food. Etc etc.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#177

Post by oceanplexian »

nimbius wrote: post #97

not that it honestly matters. the whole cabal of private healthcare has become such a teetering house of cards post covid that credit reporting agencies no longer count medical debt in your score. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/medical-debt...

I don't know why people see this as a good thing. Healthcare is expensive for precisely the reason that people skip out on paying their debt. Now it's harder to collect so what's the result? Costs are going to go up to subsidize the increased cost of collection.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#178

Post by willcipriano »

culopatin wrote: post #149
ziddoap wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Average nurse practitioner salary 115k. Why are they putting medical debt on credit cards? Are you asking why they couldn't afford 70% of an average salary (which, there is a 50% chance this person made less than the average) in one shot? Your entire post seems to be victim blaming based on a few sentences of context. You don't know what other debts and obligations these people had, nor what other avenues they trie…

Maybe what they are asking is how someone making an average of 115k, who is also in healthcare doesn’t have better health coverage and still decides to have a kid.

She wouldn't of had any coverage at all. Obamacare puts the out of pocket max well below 80k. At that income level and field, that's a choice. Is the idea that I'm supposed to pick up the tab or feel sorry for her? I make less than she does and I pay for my health insurance.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#179

Post by corrral »

peteradio wrote: post #88
bombcar wrote: post #74

Interesting: > For many Americans, debt from medical or dental care may be relatively low. About a third owe less than $1,000, the KFF poll found. I wonder how they'd count me, who puts all expenses on a credit card and pays it off each month, technically I'm going into debt ...

I wonder how they consider my family who receives bogus bills that are being mishandled by insurance or the hospital or both.

2/3 childbirths we missed one (tiny, in both cases) medical bill and it ended up in collections.

We were getting like 3-5 letters per provider per visit, and many visits resulted in bills from multiple providers.

"NOT A BILL" (so why the fuck are you sending it to me?) same thing again from insurance for some reason, incorrect bills we had to fight, insurance refusing to pay on things they should so that drags out for months and you're getting "FINAL BILL" in the meantime but the hospital billing people are telling you not to pay them until insurance is sorted out.

Many providers sending a bill exactly once and it goes to collections if you don't pay in 30 days, no calls or follow-ups (that's how both of ours ended up there—again, they were tiny, we'd have paid them instantly if we'd known about them).

Bills showing up two months after a visit and you've had 30 medical appointments in the last year so you can't remember WTF it was for. I think in one case we were still sorting crap out from the birth and prenatal care when the kid was 6 months old.

Hospital requiring full payment months in advance for the births. And getting it very wrong in one case (on the high side, of course—every billing error is in the hospital's favor, super weird how that works, bet it's just an accident and not them being actual no-bullshit criminals, though eyeroll) because they refused to use our version of what insurance would pay (which was correct) and basically just made up a number.

Total fucking mess. Horrible experience every time. Can't wait to get to deal with this horseshit when one of us is actually, seriously sick. I've added hospital billing departments to the list of medical-related folks I truly, sincerely wish the worst on, and I mean the worst—show me the headline, I'll open the champagne. They're either shockingly incompetent in ways that mess up people's lives, or they're malicious. Maybe both.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#180

Post by bombcar »

swatcoder wrote: post #109
bombcar wrote: post #74

Interesting: > For many Americans, debt from medical or dental care may be relatively low. About a third owe less than $1,000, the KFF poll found. I wonder how they'd count me, who puts all expenses on a credit card and pays it off each month, technically I'm going into debt ...

No need to wonder. You can read the poll and results methodology yourself. The answer is two clicks from the article, both links above the fold on their respective page. If you’re being genuine in your curiosity, it would improve the discussion here if you shared what answer you find.

> The survey was designed to reach adults who currently have health care debt or have had health care debt in the last five years. In order to do this, the probability panel sample included an oversample of panel members with annual household incomes less than $30,000, individuals with current or past health care debt (n=641) were included in the sample. In addition, 52 adults with past or current health care debt were reached by calling back respondents that had previously completed an interview on the SSRS Omnibus poll (and other RDD polls) and reported an annual household income of less than $25,000.

> The combined online and telephone samples, excluding oversamples, were weighted to match the sample’s demographics to the U.S. population using data from the Census Bureau’s 2021 Current Population Survey (CPS). On the basis of this weighted sample, parameters for the debt and no-debt populations were extracted. Weighting parameters for each group included sex, age, education, race/ethnicity, region, education, and income, as well as patterns of civic engagement from the September 2017 Volunteering and Civic Life Supplement data from the CPS. The sample was also weighted to match population density parameters from the Census Planning Database 2020. The weights take into account differences in the probability of selection for each sample type. This includes adjustment for the sample design and geographic stratification of the cell phone sample, within household probability of selection, and the design of the panel-recruitment procedure.

So they intentionally targeted people with debt, so the "63% percent of respondents" is not able to be read as "63% percent of Americans".

The 100M in the title is extrapolated, and is likely correct, but people are not reading the percentages as they should be read.

The key takeaway from the study is that not all medical debt is reported as such, and poor people have difficulty paying bills, one type of which is medical bills.

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