politics

The flip side of this debate is that by banning all medical debt from credit reports, patients will have no incentive to pay their medical bills and instead just skip them entirely, forcing hospitals to demand payment up front, raise prices even further, etc.

What do I say to that? Fuck 'em.

First, stop jacking up the prices of mundane items. Asprin shouldn't be costing me $20+ per pill just to cure a headache. That doctor that stopped in for 3 seconds to ask how I was doing shouldn't run me $2500.

Second, make sure bills are (a) accurate, and (b) easy to read. Don't just stick some medical jargon and some huge number as a line item and expect patients to just blindly pay it without question. At best, expect them to question it (which is how most of the inaccuracies are found), and at worst, they'll just ignore the bill entirely, especially if it's out of their financial reach. Giving the patient a clean, easy to understand, reasonable and most importantly accurate hospital bill would at least give hospitals some chance of getting some of the money.

Third, if they want to go after someone for the money, go after the god damned insurance companies. Tell them to cover what they said they were going to cover. Tell them to stop weaseling out of paying by using semantics and doublespeak to get away with not paying on a technicality. Tell them to stop with the sky-high deductibles. But you were never going to get any of the money by harassing and ruining the credit of a mother of two who was already struggling to make ends meet before whatever health issues brought her to the hospital in the first place. That $12,000 bill you sent her? Might as well have been for $12,000,000,000. You had the exact same chances of that person being able to pay off either one in the first place: 0.

And finally, stop sending multiple bills that are days, weeks, or even months apart. I don't care how "independent" your doctors are or whatever the case is. I should expect to get one hospital bill, not half a dozen spread out over months. How you accomplish this shouldn't be my problem. But if you're going to continue doing this, don't be surprised when those bills go unpaid or are lost in the shuffle because the patient thinks they already handled that and just proceed to ignore it. Patients shouldn't suffer because hospitals can't figure out how the hell to even bill their patients properly.

If hospitals want their money, let them get it from the insurance companies that we're paying thousands of dollars a month to in the first place, not the people who never wanted to be in a situation where they needed hospital care and would never have the resources to pay it back in the first place. Let the patients try to rebuild their lives, and go after the insurance companies that we're paying to handle this for us.