Have you paid off your medical bills?
I overpaid my first big bill. The hospital called implying (though not directly stating) that if I didn't prepay, my surgery might not be allowed to go through. They said it would cost $10k, and I said, "Can't we wait until after the bills come in?"
She said, "No, I am telling you it will cost $10k. " I let her max out my credit card to $5k and she was happy as a clam. It turned out the total was less than $4k, so I got a credit back on my card.
I will never allow myself to be bullied like that again. For other medical bills, I pay them as they come. We have an emergency fund, so we pay any unexpected bills out of there.
You have to stay on the providers and the insurers, though. Their paperwork isn't so hot. I've had to call more than once to remind them that I'd paid before they cleared the bill.
Other times, I've had to fight to get my insurance company to pay up. So far, I've always gotten it right with phone calls.
Ugh. Two years ago I had a run-in with the emergency room. Went in with massive chest pains (I felt like I was in a vise) and x-rays, EKGs, and TYLENOL cost my insurance company about $4,000.
I ended up having to pay about $1,700 out of pocket. Thankfully, my insurance has an out of pocket cap. Once I hit $1,000, I only had to pay 10% of the rest of my bills.
Thank god. We got it paid off fairly quickly. Yay for us.
I'm lucky enough to have insurance so I or my family don't have any medical debts. But we also have been fortunate enough to have never had emergencies or accidents that will make our insurance run out. We've had a couple of hospitalizations but nothing major.
I really think the way medicine works in the US is unfortunate. I don't see why you would have to go bankrupt to save your own life when we should all have a right to healthcare. The state really needs to do something.
I had a seizure when I was little (around 3 or 4) and spent the night in the hospital. They ran all kinds of tests, did a spinal tap, and they never figured out what caused it. But a few years ago my family finally finished paying off the bill after 12!
I don't know how much we paid a month, but a one night stay in the hospital and a few tests add up to more than the average family can reasonably pay without going into bankruptcy.
"I paid it in full so they couldn't do it to me again," Lindsay said. She recently testified at a hearing on aggressive debt collection practices in Illinois. Refinancing a home loan can be affected too by unpaid medical bills - or the appearance of unpaid medical bills.
Iraq veteran Steve Barnes and his wife, Tara, were refinancing their home through a VA program when they found out from their mortgage banker that nearly $600 in unpaid medical bills had brought down their credit scores. It means they'll have to pay an extra $1,700 in additional fees to the lender to get the lowest interest rate. Bills for treatment last fall related to his wife's cancer had been turned over to a collection agency while Barnes was still talking with his insurance company about what would be covered, he said.
"We pay our bills," said Barnes, 33, the postmaster in Nocona, Texas. "As soon as they were brought to our attention, we paid them." But the collection could stay on their credit reports for seven years, even though it's now paid.
Debt collectors support the legislation in the House, according to ACA International, a trade association. A key foe of an earlier bill was another group representing the nation's credit bureaus. The Consumer Data Industry Association, which hasn't taken a position on the revised bill, said that lenders need to see a consumer's patterns of behavior over time and even paid-off medical debt is relevant to whether the consumer is a good risk.
Most hospitals and physician groups use collection agencies to go after late bills after 60 or 90 days, rather than hiring more staff. It makes financial sense to share the amounts collected with an agency. "If you don't collect anything, it's worth zero," said Richard Gundling of the Healthcare Financial Management Association.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.
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