Majority of debtors to US hospitals now people with health insurance

A different insurance was $70.

The medicaid patients are $40 (and our company would collapse if we only had these patients). They are basically break even, or a loss when they call off.

Now we aren't part of the hospital or physicians cartel, we are a tiny offshoot with no lobbying power... yet. Medical is a legal squeeze, not a technical one. Sorry for playing the game too. You need to fight against Medical.

I'll give my most recent thing that ended up in collections (which you can easily ignore, it doesn't affect your credit at all in some states). I had a pretty intensive surgery. I had a copay, which was shown to me before the surgery. I signed it, paid, think everything is good.

However, in the background, which happens often, the insurance company and the hospital/doctor are still haggling about who owes what. Eventually they can't come to a decision, and the hospital punts it to the patient or collections. Even better - say you do pay this “surprise” bill. Sometimes the insurer eventually pays up. Guess what happens then? Does the doctor/hospital notify you then that you overpaid? Very rarely. For me it was a $800 bill on top of the thousands I already paid for anasthesia (and some other stuff).

Hospitals and insurers are putting patients in the middle of their disputes and it rarely ends up well for the patient. Hospitals acting like they're somehow the victim here is extremely rich from my perspective, they are at least half of the entire problem.

I recommend letting them go to collections and then disputing it there. Lots of times these collections agencies use shady practices that give you some good leverage, or it's a double billing scenario like I described above.

When you’ve budgeted the $7,400 to pay for premiums whether or not you use healthcare, and the insurance doesn’t even kick in until you’ve spent a total of $16,800 on medical care in a given year, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me that people feel like they’ve already paid enough, and that the payers and providers should sort it out amongst themselves.

There’s economic, contractual, and policy reality; but then, even among people who might be able to afford it, there’s the gut feeling of “I’ve already paid way too much for this 5-minute checkup, I’m not paying more.”