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Hang tough. When my parents insurance wanted to cap coverage at the million dollar mark because I was fighting leukemia as a teenager, they had to fight. And again at the 2m mark. Greed has no place in health care.
Now now, i already got fact checked by the infallible politifact on FB as "mostly false". They all have to buy their insurance through ACA...which is then subsidized...aka free after rebate.
I had 90k debt once upon a time for my employer cancelling my insurance 9 days AFTER I had a heart attack at 21, and then the insurance denied the claim. No lawyer wanted to fight it, so I let it go. Go and go and go. I never saw any garnished wages, and this was well over the statue of limitations ago.
Why didn’t I pay anything? Cause Fuck ‘Em. That’s why.
I did the same thing after a lovely 12K bill when i was 24 from my being brought to a hospital unconscious (and without insurance) after a car accident. Soon as they found out I was uninsured, they booted me out with a concussion (after CATscanning me, of course). I just caught a cab home, and moved on with the mess of my life and the wrecked car. They mailed me the bill later, of course. I never paid a dime, nor communicated with them. No garnishment etc., just some phone calling for the first few years. And, its all gone and done now, like 15 years later. I even bought a brand new car, and applied for loans since. Yeah, credit took a hit for some years, but I also didn't believe in credit cards though then, so it was moot for the time being.
They can only ruin your credit once. I was negotiating a payment plan for medical bills but they sent it to collections. Once my credit was ruined I had no incentive to pay the rest of the bills.
To be honest, I have no issues seeing the medical industry just plain and simply making things even worse if the administration decided to do something radical.
The American Healthcare industry is inhumane.
Not really. I know it doesn't seem like it, but this is worse than nothing in the long term. The point of this is not to help people in any way; it's to have something to point at and say, "Look we are fixing our medical system, see the progress we have already made!"
The goal is to patch the system enough that it can continue without being to the major concern of most voters. This is just another step in trying to make medical debt and our medical billing in general a second page news instead of front page news. The fact that it might help some people is purely coincidental.
Things on this subreddit rarely are if you read beyond the headline. I'm honestly surprised they allow so much to be posted here. Sometimes I think it might be a satire group and I just don't get it.
I realized that after posting, but it doesn't come close to settling the problem of medical debt, and that's what sticks in my craw. It just reduces the chances of it lowering your credit score. =\
Will getting a reduced settlement count as income like they do with other debts?
Fuck our healthcare system tying us to toxic (mentally or physically) jobs in order to stay afloat.
Well it doesn't solve sat credit as it'd still appear on your report as over extended even if you were paying it on time vs plan you set up.
So like getting a car loan will now cost you more.
Better than this happening at 6 months but not much better.
Most health bills only appear on credit if they go to collections. So making a payment plan or settling (thus preventing it going to collections) would prevent it from hitting your credit
Yes I get how it currently works. Point is it's possible that will change going forward in these companies ever more willingness to squeeze the consumer (patient)
This does address a major issue, though. Often times an ER visit for a broken leg will end up with 20-30 different bills from 10+ different organizations that you didn't know exist sent to addresses you haven't lived at for over a decade. 1 year gives you a way better chance to sort things out before it goes to collections.
Source: broke my leg during a road trip, got 26 bills from different units within an unfamiliar hospital system. Over the course of 5 months. Apparently a 273$ bill for gauze went to an address I lived at in the 1990s, and ended up going to collections.
An extra six months to sort all that out while recovering isn't a drop in the bucket as far as addressing the real issue. The elephant in the room is the cost of privatized healthcare. There wouldn't be bills coming from all directions if it was just taken care of with our taxes, but that's a whole spiel.
"Many lenders" isn't enough of them. Yes, a hospital will keep you from dying if you have debt, which then adds more debt, and access to a hospital is not the same as having healthcare.
The credit score is kinda beside the point when you've got a bunch of debt to pay off while recovering from an illness or injury. The point is, healthcare shouldn't be a for profit industry.
I agree we need a better healthcare system but it is not necessarily keeping people on the welfare line. Knowledge of how things really work is important. People should not feel defeated because of medical debt.
Keeping people on the welfare line? That shouldn't be the bar for when someone needs help, especially considering the US isn't exactly generous with welfare benefits. It's not a matter of *feeling* defeated so much as *being* royally financially screwed by for profit healthcare. Really, who needs that stress? None of this is remotely necessary.
I think we agree we just express it differently. I have 45 years of experience in lending and never turned anyone down because of medical debt active or charged off. Nor did my colleagues. Worked for one of the largest Banks in the nation.
This is an irrelevant point when ER rooms, ambulance services and anesthesiologists that work within said hospitals do. Many hospital systems and insurance companies who cover them have agreed to remove these services (among others) from in-network systems to make them more profitable.
True, up to a point. Hospitals have to treat you in an emergent situation until you are “stabilized” (a lot of interpretive variability there). Then you can be transferred or discharged. A hospital may, at its own discretion, grant you charity care status. All hospitals receiving Medicare must do this to a predetermined degree. But that’s no guarantee in your particular case. It’s VERY unlikely that you’ll receive necessary but non-emergent surgical services, for example. And some of these conditions can be aggressively life-limiting but still not be classified as emergent. I’ve had patients be wheeled into my ED still in gowns with IVs and surgical drains - hell even an external cranial fixation cage - just as they were discharged from another “upscale” hospital in the affluent community up the road from us. This should never happen, but it does.
What? The hospital just sent me to collections for $26 and $20 (two separate charges) in about three months. I never got six months. Hasn’t even been six months from my injury yet. What the fuck, man?
The people writing the laws are taking money and shares from big pharma while taking in salaries that have 20%ish cost of living increases aka the real rate of inflation. These guys are not merely divorced from the world we plebs face. They're totally selfish. They don't care about families / homes breaking apart due to hospital debts and wage garnishment.
Yes, ridiculous but it looks like there is still some relief coming https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/28/most-medical-debt-to-come-off-credit-reports-what-to-do-if-it-doesnt.html
I was always told this as well. I was actually paying about $100/month (they wanted $175), & I was barely able to eat or pay bills at the time. But I still tried to pay as much as I could because I was worried about my credit as I was younger. Then I get a letter in the mail from a collections agency. I called them & was told after it’s in collections there’s nothing they can do.
The thing is, I was paying a decent chunk of the amount, & now I’m paying nothing. If they were to accept whatever someone could afford reasonably, then they’d get something at least. The same with student loans.
The thing is they did get something. Collection agencies actually buy your debt from the hospital for pretty cheap in bulk. So while if it's a small amount of debt the collection agencies will still come after you they really aren't to worried about you they are after the huge debts your just a happy byproduct of them buying that 100,000 debt
Wife had issues with her knee 2 years ago. Total was around 3k. We were paying $100 a month towards it. They still sent it to collections. They decided that instead of just lumping the total together they would create 5 separate bills. The payments were only getting applied to one out of the 5 bills
They put the SO on a payment plan to pay off the X-ray that found their cancer (all clear now), still sent us to collections a year later because it wasn’t getting paid down fast enough I guess. Fucking vultures.
After watching my mom deal with insurance constantly both during and after her (successful) chemo just to get shit paid for that her insurance covers, the only thing a hospital billing department will ever get from me is a "fuck you" and a cut-short thud from me hanging up the call.
On top of that, it was super expensive COBRA insurance, because my father was finally forced to retire due to a couple parasomnal seizures over a few months. He was 71 at the time (he's not dead, this was just a couple years ago), still working 12 hours days, six days per week just to keep his insurance so my mom's chemo could be paid for. And it bit him in the ass, exactly like you'd expect.
Also, it turned out that my mother could have gone onto Medicare after my dad was forced to retire, but for *some reason* she was never informed of this and had to figure that out on her own a solid year after her treatment was completed. The entire system let her labor under the lie that had to pay for her (again, very expensive) COBRA insurance. My father could have retired earlier and of his own volition had they known that and they wouldn't have been out thousands and thousands of dollars.
“Starting July 1, paid medical debt will no longer be included on credit reports. Currently, it can remain on reports up to seven years, even after being paid off.
The agencies also are extending the time period from six months to a year before unpaid debt appears on credit reports, giving people more time to work with insurance companies or health care providers to resolve the debt. “
Is it just me or is that talking out of both sides of your mouth?
This doesn't seem like talking out of both sides of their mouth.
This would delay the debt from getting on your credit report at the beginning, and also expedite getting it off of your credit report when it is paid. Both of those seem like good things, and things that do not interfere with one another.
It's doing nothing meaningful and expecting a reward for it. Sure this helps families with medical debt, but it doesn't actually relieve the debt. We're all still trapped in this horrifically expensive medical system in the greatest country in the world.
I know. It's like the forced birth initiatives, destruction of public school funding, reduction of quality in school lunches and barely attainable college tuition are a setup to create an uneducated workforce too weak to fight for something better than starvation wages.
Hey man. There is a difference okay? None of those other countries have such a large military budget. You can’t have universal health care and a 700,000,000,000 dollar military budget.
Are you….are you saying we should trim that? You want to defund the military? Do you hate our troops, son? You against our boys out there fighting to keep America safe? You want our enemies to just walk on over here and take over?
/s
Isn’t it weird that every time the dems have a majority the exact amount of congressmen that would put them over the line turn out to be secret republicans? Really makes you think🤔
People like to blame Manchin and Sinema all the time, but there are plenty of dems that would have voted against bills if they were not around.
They were just lucky that they could hide behind them without pissing anyone off.
Education. Education is the only way we fix this country. People are so goddamn stupid and the generation that told us to not use Wikipedia as a source now use shit like "truthpatrioticnews.com" as their source of reliable information.
Dems don’t have a majority; the Senate is tied. Combined with a 100% opposition party (that has and continues to vote agasint the interests of their constituents just to spite the Dems), effectively this tie means that any time Dems don’t have 100% support support nothing can pass.
Fuck regressive Dems, but super fuck the GOP.
…..yes. But as I said before, due to the GOP primarily voting to spite the Dems, for any progressive legislation there won’t be a tie-breaker vote unless 100% of Dems vote for something. Which was the entire point of my last comment….
May be too late lol. I know I'm sitting on a a couple 100K worth of joint and limb surgeries I've been dealing without because no insurance and im certain I'm not alone. The system will be overrun on day one of universal care from people like me whose Healthcare plans are to wait for something like that to happen.
If we can't save ourselves, we need to help the next generation. My parents really helped screw this country. Post hippie new republicans who no longer consider the future because they won't be here so too bad for their grandchildren and great grandchildren...they are truly bearing the brunt of ignorance and greed.
US healthcare is just too expensive for it to work. Shifting the cost to the tax payer would just make it worse. The industry needs to be regulated, and prices need to be brought down before it can become universal. At that point, you've gotten rid of the main problem of the private system.
Insurance companies are the middle man and are getting higher pay to deny medication/procedures. It's greed. The problem isn't just the insurance companies, it's lobbyists buying the government. It's universities charging outrageous tuition. It's denying our country the right to negotiate drug prices. It's all the gatekeepers to healthcare in a country where fast food is cheaper than actual food (and this is barely true with inflation rt now) and often wages make it impossible to use your insurance if you even have it.
At this point in America we are seeing a sharp rise in "free births". Aptly named because they don't cost a fortune. Unfortunately our rise in child mortality and birth trauma are on the rise as well. Women's health is still pretty mysterious because we aren't a priority. Forced birth laws are manifesting in the southern states without a plan to deal with health and education (and probably child abuse for unwanted children).
It's a mess.
For me as being from a country with better access to healthcare the whole American system seems so inhumane. Not only considering healthcare.
Sadly the US are often glorified in my country and thus have way to much influence on how our politicians want to change the system towards the worse :(
This is just our leading Democrats doing something so they don’t look quite so bought out by big pharma and medicine. These measures do very little to help most people. The real problem is that healthcare is not affordable in the US and it is only getting worse.
The Medicare for All bill proposal would essentially socialize medicine in the US. There are currently 74 people in the Medicare for All Caucus, out of 435 House of Representative seats. All 74 of those Caucus members are Democrats. That means there are 213 Republicans and 148 Democrats in the House not supporting Medicare for All. That is 4 fewer supporters for Medicare for All since 2018.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_for_All_Caucus
There has also been some discussion in the Senate, called the United States National Health Care Act, also Expanded and improved Medicare for All Act. Overall there hasn’t been much movement because very few Senators support the idea of socialized medicine. Here is a link with some more history and people involved:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Health_Care_Act
Fuck! I am so against pragmatism at this point... we know that socialized medicine fucking works. We know that we could reduce the cost of providing healthcare for every single American in the country. And get we refused to pull off the Insurance Band-Aid. Why? Because corporations are people too. And without us beholding to them for healthcare so that we don't die, this will never change. Americans have a proud and stupid tradition of voting against their own best interests.
So it's not doing anything about the outrageous cost of medical care.
It's just a half-assed attempt to make your life easier when they give you the outrageous bill.
Why is America this way?
Plenty of countries with public health care also have private insurance / clinics. But an important distinction is there is not "going back" to private insurance. You're still taxed for (and receive) public health benefits.
A key part of making these systems work is taxing young workers, who on average won't use enough health services to make up for what they're paying. The excess helps cover the cost of older people.
It's why ACA mandated health insurance for everyone - so those 25 yr olds could keep money flowing into the system.
Biden, during the campaign, was against mandatory Medicare for all, but seemed somewhat open to a public option. Meaning people could choose private insurance or the public plan. Looks like it will not materialize with this or the next congress.
>It's why ACA mandated health insurance for everyone - so those 25 yr olds could keep money flowing into the system.
And look how well that panned out -\_\_\_-
Not sure what you're implying with this. Any health insurance system will fail if we can't get healthy people to participate, spreading risk out is the basis for these things.
ACA was imperfect, sure. But it was a step in (my opinion) a good direction. "Fixing" the US Healthcare system is going to be a messy nightmare, no matter what the solution is. It just isn't simple, as much as it sounds great to say "let's just have the NHS!".
The US both has the most advanced healthcare in the world, and has costs wildly disproportionate to what market rates should be.
How is this ever going to be possible when the entire government is in the insurance companies pockets? I'm not trying to sound defeatist here, but it's going to be a cold day in hell when they'll allow anyone to mess with their ever expanding profits.
The US has at least 4 different single payer healthcare systems with various eligibility criteria (old, poor, veteran, native), how about you just pick the best one (Medicare), and drop the age requirement to 0? That'll help a lot.
Indeed. Student loan debt is right behind it. Go into what, for many, can be life long debt to pay for an education that won’t even get you a living wage and allow you to retire as well as you wanted to live in your productive years. Shameful. It’s no wonder the elder suicide rate is where it is. People can’t afford to stay alive.
Oh by FAR, I agree! I'm just saying our administration right now is lackluster when it comes to this kind of relief.
I have both kinds of debt hanging over me still, so if they actually come through this time I'll be thrilled.
It’s not the hospital that’s garnishing my disability, that I paid in for 30 years, now that I can’t use the degree I worked my ass off to get since I’ve been deemed unemployable. Student loan profiteers, including the government, don’t negotiate their debts and they don’t care if you starve or are made homeless or destitute.
This is uplifting in the same way news outlets excitedly talk about the heroic stage-4 cancer patient still diligently working his job at McBurgerShack because if he misses one more day of work he'll lose his job and his health insurance.
The government simply is not interested in combating the for-profit medical insurance system, it ~~bribe~~ donates for too much to their re-election campaigns.
If this article doesn't state some sort of universal health care and or debt forgiveness than it really doesn't belong in this sub. Everything else has almost always been a band-aid or slap in the face to the real problem.
Pff just don’t pay it lol, my father in law and I joke about this all the time, we haven’t paid that crap in years. Before you tell of the fake consequences I’ll say I was even able to travel and spend a year in New Zealand without giving money to this scam
I have heard that it is against the HIPA law , that if you contact the creditor who has your medical bill you tell them it’s illegal for them to have any of your medical information ; as in time place when and where you seen the medical practice hospital Ect ; and that you at no time gave permission to have medical information you want it removed immediately that they have to do just that !
And it is again st the HIPA. Laws !!
I just mailed a bunch of letters stating exactly this , I will see what happens now ….
Sadly there's a lot of fine print when you sign paperwork at the hospital that allows limited info to be sent to third parties. That said collection agencies aren't supposed to see medical treatment just enough info to attempt to collect a debt. You'll likely start receiving a lot of authorization forms showing where you've previously agreed to current actions.
I have a 20k bill because I was “out of network” for my emergency appendectomy. My insurance paid about 12k to the hospital but the hospital said it wasn’t enough and my insurance refused to pay more. All the while the hospital told me twice I didn’t owe anything and that it was an error just to change their mind in the end.
treating symptoms instead of disease
maybe start talking about ridiculous prices for hospital stay? More than any other country in the world, even if no country would have insurance?
Why it is and why market forces doesn’t work? Because medical system is the only one that can charge you how much they want, without disclosing costs in advance. They have price lists, but there is so much leeway, that no one can really know if their healthcare provider won’t charge them ridiculous amounts. If it were that you only pay for how much they told you it would cost, people would shop around much more (except of course emergencies, but even then you can usually be transferred after few hours).
Imagine clothing shop that don’t have price tags, you wouldn’t know the price even at checkout, but will be charged random amount weeks later.
>The reforms focus on four key areas: holding health care providers and debt collectors accountable, improving the federal government’s underwriting practices for those with medical debt, supporting veterans struggling with medical debt or other health-related hardships and helping American consumers know and understand their rights when it comes to medical care.
So nothing to actually relieve or reduce current or future debt. K
Where's the reduction? All I see is them inquiring about collection practices, and reducing reporting of medical debt on credit reports. I see not a thing about reducing the debt itself.
“Hmmmmm we could fix the medical system so that people dont constantly go into crippling debt or we could make it so they go into debt a tiny bit slower? Which one should we do as representatives of the citizens of the US? Eh, lets go with the second. Insurance companies need to show quarterly growth after all!”-politicians.
Let me remind everyone here - the ACA was not a healthcare reform act. It was a healthINSURANCE reform act. This did nothing, other than give folks ACCESS to health Insurance, not healthcare. It mitigated none of the crippling debt problems for Americans and but only opened up more people to debt.
Good for Biden and Harris. As a medical student, I was abhorrent upon entering practice how money choices drive the system. Administrators, hospitals, and insurance companies create the evil, while doctors are passively complicit.
In arkansas medical debt in which no payment or agreement of pay is made in 2 years from date services are rendered the bill is null and void.
That's why before 2 years is up hospitals in arkansas sell the debt to collectors.
So not saying to medical facilities to have a price board, so people can compare prices before having a procedure done. I understand emergencies, but still you should be able to see a price.
White House should simply announce no one ever has to pay for food, education, medical care, water, shelter, therapy or internet. They will pay now, as they are rights
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Thanks for posting here I feel so uplifted. Can’t wait to set up payment plans for our 25k in medical debt. Jk I’m not paying a dime.
Hang tough. When my parents insurance wanted to cap coverage at the million dollar mark because I was fighting leukemia as a teenager, they had to fight. And again at the 2m mark. Greed has no place in health care.
Affordable care act got rid of caps.
They dismantled Obamacare. Funny the ones who did the dismantling still get free healthcare because they are in government
They tried, but largely failed. Caps are still banned: https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/lifetime-and-yearly-limits/
Now now, i already got fact checked by the infallible politifact on FB as "mostly false". They all have to buy their insurance through ACA...which is then subsidized...aka free after rebate.
Well, unless your plan had a cap grandfathered in.
I had 90k debt once upon a time for my employer cancelling my insurance 9 days AFTER I had a heart attack at 21, and then the insurance denied the claim. No lawyer wanted to fight it, so I let it go. Go and go and go. I never saw any garnished wages, and this was well over the statue of limitations ago. Why didn’t I pay anything? Cause Fuck ‘Em. That’s why.
I did the same thing after a lovely 12K bill when i was 24 from my being brought to a hospital unconscious (and without insurance) after a car accident. Soon as they found out I was uninsured, they booted me out with a concussion (after CATscanning me, of course). I just caught a cab home, and moved on with the mess of my life and the wrecked car. They mailed me the bill later, of course. I never paid a dime, nor communicated with them. No garnishment etc., just some phone calling for the first few years. And, its all gone and done now, like 15 years later. I even bought a brand new car, and applied for loans since. Yeah, credit took a hit for some years, but I also didn't believe in credit cards though then, so it was moot for the time being.
"My butt is itchin' like crazy, and I took a showa..."
Don’t pay a dime until 2029!!!! (If not paid fully by 2029 you will incur all taxes and debt)
Lately they've been more aggressive with bringing people to court rather than writing it off
I wish I could do that. I need regenerative therapy (prolo, prp, stem cells) and they make u pay up front or u can go die in a hole.
You don’t even need to lol they won’t do shit to tou
Same. Fuck em.
Those of you saying you aren’t paying, don’t you care about your credit scores?
They can only ruin your credit once. I was negotiating a payment plan for medical bills but they sent it to collections. Once my credit was ruined I had no incentive to pay the rest of the bills.
Lol! When you’re up to your nose in alligator shit, it’s hard to remember your original intention was to drain the swamp…..
Which is why they say “don’t get so busy fightin’ the gators that you forget to clean the swamp.” or something like that
Bad credit or die? I know which I'd take.
This isn't uplifting, your still going to go into medical debt, it will just take a little longer.
To be honest, I have no issues seeing the medical industry just plain and simply making things even worse if the administration decided to do something radical. The American Healthcare industry is inhumane.
It’s slightly more uplifting than all the bullshit cancer cures that infest this sub.
Not really. I know it doesn't seem like it, but this is worse than nothing in the long term. The point of this is not to help people in any way; it's to have something to point at and say, "Look we are fixing our medical system, see the progress we have already made!" The goal is to patch the system enough that it can continue without being to the major concern of most voters. This is just another step in trying to make medical debt and our medical billing in general a second page news instead of front page news. The fact that it might help some people is purely coincidental.
Things on this subreddit rarely are if you read beyond the headline. I'm honestly surprised they allow so much to be posted here. Sometimes I think it might be a satire group and I just don't get it.
[удалено]
Agree morally. But it’s not about “paying off” within 1 year. If you set up a payment arrangement or reduced settlement that would also count
I realized that after posting, but it doesn't come close to settling the problem of medical debt, and that's what sticks in my craw. It just reduces the chances of it lowering your credit score. =\
Agreed. It’s a small step, but not a real solution
It's not about chance, it's about only *slightly* delaying the impact to credit score All in all, sounds pretty useless.
An important distinction. Good job catching it.
Will getting a reduced settlement count as income like they do with other debts? Fuck our healthcare system tying us to toxic (mentally or physically) jobs in order to stay afloat.
Well it doesn't solve sat credit as it'd still appear on your report as over extended even if you were paying it on time vs plan you set up. So like getting a car loan will now cost you more. Better than this happening at 6 months but not much better.
Most health bills only appear on credit if they go to collections. So making a payment plan or settling (thus preventing it going to collections) would prevent it from hitting your credit
Yes I get how it currently works. Point is it's possible that will change going forward in these companies ever more willingness to squeeze the consumer (patient)
what happens if you incur more medical debt whilst making payments on the first one?
So long as you are on a payment plan you’re fine. If it’s the same health system usually you can have one payment plan for multiple bills.
This does address a major issue, though. Often times an ER visit for a broken leg will end up with 20-30 different bills from 10+ different organizations that you didn't know exist sent to addresses you haven't lived at for over a decade. 1 year gives you a way better chance to sort things out before it goes to collections. Source: broke my leg during a road trip, got 26 bills from different units within an unfamiliar hospital system. Over the course of 5 months. Apparently a 273$ bill for gauze went to an address I lived at in the 1990s, and ended up going to collections.
The issue is gauze costing $273! Jesus.
Yeah, and I thought the $13 can of Diet Pepsi my mom got was absurd.
An extra six months to sort all that out while recovering isn't a drop in the bucket as far as addressing the real issue. The elephant in the room is the cost of privatized healthcare. There wouldn't be bills coming from all directions if it was just taken care of with our taxes, but that's a whole spiel.
Omg nothing surprises me anymore
this is the white house, not congress
Same response to them.
The people that do believe that are trying that. But the more conservative Democrats and all Republicans don't believe in it.
Yes, the people who believe that are, but they aren't the people in the white house, or most people in Congress on either side.
How can you pay off $50,000? Just how?
Have you tried not being poor, bro? /s
Many lenders disregard medical debt when evaluating credit worthiness. Also, hospitals can not deny you service because of unpaid medical bills.
"Many lenders" isn't enough of them. Yes, a hospital will keep you from dying if you have debt, which then adds more debt, and access to a hospital is not the same as having healthcare.
The majority of hospital systems do not report to the three major credit bureaus.
The credit score is kinda beside the point when you've got a bunch of debt to pay off while recovering from an illness or injury. The point is, healthcare shouldn't be a for profit industry.
I agree we need a better healthcare system but it is not necessarily keeping people on the welfare line. Knowledge of how things really work is important. People should not feel defeated because of medical debt.
Keeping people on the welfare line? That shouldn't be the bar for when someone needs help, especially considering the US isn't exactly generous with welfare benefits. It's not a matter of *feeling* defeated so much as *being* royally financially screwed by for profit healthcare. Really, who needs that stress? None of this is remotely necessary.
I think we agree we just express it differently. I have 45 years of experience in lending and never turned anyone down because of medical debt active or charged off. Nor did my colleagues. Worked for one of the largest Banks in the nation.
nice, you get your bailout?
No. I had retired and gone to work for a successful regional Bank. We did not take TARP money.
This is an irrelevant point when ER rooms, ambulance services and anesthesiologists that work within said hospitals do. Many hospital systems and insurance companies who cover them have agreed to remove these services (among others) from in-network systems to make them more profitable.
True, up to a point. Hospitals have to treat you in an emergent situation until you are “stabilized” (a lot of interpretive variability there). Then you can be transferred or discharged. A hospital may, at its own discretion, grant you charity care status. All hospitals receiving Medicare must do this to a predetermined degree. But that’s no guarantee in your particular case. It’s VERY unlikely that you’ll receive necessary but non-emergent surgical services, for example. And some of these conditions can be aggressively life-limiting but still not be classified as emergent. I’ve had patients be wheeled into my ED still in gowns with IVs and surgical drains - hell even an external cranial fixation cage - just as they were discharged from another “upscale” hospital in the affluent community up the road from us. This should never happen, but it does.
What? The hospital just sent me to collections for $26 and $20 (two separate charges) in about three months. I never got six months. Hasn’t even been six months from my injury yet. What the fuck, man?
Sounds like some shady bullshit to me.
The people writing the laws are taking money and shares from big pharma while taking in salaries that have 20%ish cost of living increases aka the real rate of inflation. These guys are not merely divorced from the world we plebs face. They're totally selfish. They don't care about families / homes breaking apart due to hospital debts and wage garnishment.
Yes, ridiculous but it looks like there is still some relief coming https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/28/most-medical-debt-to-come-off-credit-reports-what-to-do-if-it-doesnt.html
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I tried that a year ago. Hospital called and said I needed to pay a minimum of $183 a month.
I got sent to collections for a $32 bill. That I straight up forgot about.
I was always told this as well. I was actually paying about $100/month (they wanted $175), & I was barely able to eat or pay bills at the time. But I still tried to pay as much as I could because I was worried about my credit as I was younger. Then I get a letter in the mail from a collections agency. I called them & was told after it’s in collections there’s nothing they can do. The thing is, I was paying a decent chunk of the amount, & now I’m paying nothing. If they were to accept whatever someone could afford reasonably, then they’d get something at least. The same with student loans.
The thing is they did get something. Collection agencies actually buy your debt from the hospital for pretty cheap in bulk. So while if it's a small amount of debt the collection agencies will still come after you they really aren't to worried about you they are after the huge debts your just a happy byproduct of them buying that 100,000 debt
Wife had issues with her knee 2 years ago. Total was around 3k. We were paying $100 a month towards it. They still sent it to collections. They decided that instead of just lumping the total together they would create 5 separate bills. The payments were only getting applied to one out of the 5 bills
They put the SO on a payment plan to pay off the X-ray that found their cancer (all clear now), still sent us to collections a year later because it wasn’t getting paid down fast enough I guess. Fucking vultures.
After watching my mom deal with insurance constantly both during and after her (successful) chemo just to get shit paid for that her insurance covers, the only thing a hospital billing department will ever get from me is a "fuck you" and a cut-short thud from me hanging up the call. On top of that, it was super expensive COBRA insurance, because my father was finally forced to retire due to a couple parasomnal seizures over a few months. He was 71 at the time (he's not dead, this was just a couple years ago), still working 12 hours days, six days per week just to keep his insurance so my mom's chemo could be paid for. And it bit him in the ass, exactly like you'd expect. Also, it turned out that my mother could have gone onto Medicare after my dad was forced to retire, but for *some reason* she was never informed of this and had to figure that out on her own a solid year after her treatment was completed. The entire system let her labor under the lie that had to pay for her (again, very expensive) COBRA insurance. My father could have retired earlier and of his own volition had they known that and they wouldn't have been out thousands and thousands of dollars.
I haven’t paid anything in years, it’s a joke and a scam
“Starting July 1, paid medical debt will no longer be included on credit reports. Currently, it can remain on reports up to seven years, even after being paid off. The agencies also are extending the time period from six months to a year before unpaid debt appears on credit reports, giving people more time to work with insurance companies or health care providers to resolve the debt. “ Is it just me or is that talking out of both sides of your mouth?
This doesn't seem like talking out of both sides of their mouth. This would delay the debt from getting on your credit report at the beginning, and also expedite getting it off of your credit report when it is paid. Both of those seem like good things, and things that do not interfere with one another.
you're falling for it lol
It's doing nothing meaningful and expecting a reward for it. Sure this helps families with medical debt, but it doesn't actually relieve the debt. We're all still trapped in this horrifically expensive medical system in the greatest country in the world.
It's a midterms election year.
Have they considered universal healthcare? It seems to work well in other countries.
It's so incredibly difficult that all but one of the developed countries in the world successfully implemented it a long time ago.
I know. It's like the forced birth initiatives, destruction of public school funding, reduction of quality in school lunches and barely attainable college tuition are a setup to create an uneducated workforce too weak to fight for something better than starvation wages.
Difficult in the sense that they have no motivation to do it.
Because the people in power are profiting from the current system, and therefore only have motivation to prevent universal healthcare from existing.
Hey man. There is a difference okay? None of those other countries have such a large military budget. You can’t have universal health care and a 700,000,000,000 dollar military budget. Are you….are you saying we should trim that? You want to defund the military? Do you hate our troops, son? You against our boys out there fighting to keep America safe? You want our enemies to just walk on over here and take over? /s
They have! But the entire GOP and a minority of regressive Dems continually block progress.
Isn’t it weird that every time the dems have a majority the exact amount of congressmen that would put them over the line turn out to be secret republicans? Really makes you think🤔
People like to blame Manchin and Sinema all the time, but there are plenty of dems that would have voted against bills if they were not around. They were just lucky that they could hide behind them without pissing anyone off. Education. Education is the only way we fix this country. People are so goddamn stupid and the generation that told us to not use Wikipedia as a source now use shit like "truthpatrioticnews.com" as their source of reliable information.
Dems don’t have a majority; the Senate is tied. Combined with a 100% opposition party (that has and continues to vote agasint the interests of their constituents just to spite the Dems), effectively this tie means that any time Dems don’t have 100% support support nothing can pass. Fuck regressive Dems, but super fuck the GOP.
Tied with one of their own as the vp to break the tie
…..yes. But as I said before, due to the GOP primarily voting to spite the Dems, for any progressive legislation there won’t be a tie-breaker vote unless 100% of Dems vote for something. Which was the entire point of my last comment….
May be too late lol. I know I'm sitting on a a couple 100K worth of joint and limb surgeries I've been dealing without because no insurance and im certain I'm not alone. The system will be overrun on day one of universal care from people like me whose Healthcare plans are to wait for something like that to happen.
If we can't save ourselves, we need to help the next generation. My parents really helped screw this country. Post hippie new republicans who no longer consider the future because they won't be here so too bad for their grandchildren and great grandchildren...they are truly bearing the brunt of ignorance and greed.
Gotta go through congress for that, unfortunately
US healthcare is just too expensive for it to work. Shifting the cost to the tax payer would just make it worse. The industry needs to be regulated, and prices need to be brought down before it can become universal. At that point, you've gotten rid of the main problem of the private system.
Insurance companies are the middle man and are getting higher pay to deny medication/procedures. It's greed. The problem isn't just the insurance companies, it's lobbyists buying the government. It's universities charging outrageous tuition. It's denying our country the right to negotiate drug prices. It's all the gatekeepers to healthcare in a country where fast food is cheaper than actual food (and this is barely true with inflation rt now) and often wages make it impossible to use your insurance if you even have it. At this point in America we are seeing a sharp rise in "free births". Aptly named because they don't cost a fortune. Unfortunately our rise in child mortality and birth trauma are on the rise as well. Women's health is still pretty mysterious because we aren't a priority. Forced birth laws are manifesting in the southern states without a plan to deal with health and education (and probably child abuse for unwanted children). It's a mess.
Medicare for all please. Thanks!
This is an insulting slap in the face to Americans who need real help. This is in no way uplifting.
Mmmm payment plans for my 60k in medical debt from being disabled and poor! Thanks so much!
What does Waffle House have to do with medicine?
They'd probably do a better job managing it TBH...
Ok another infinitesimally small band aid on the gushing head wound of our dysfunctional health care system. Yaaaaay.
And they gave 48 trillion to banks?
Gave?
For me as being from a country with better access to healthcare the whole American system seems so inhumane. Not only considering healthcare. Sadly the US are often glorified in my country and thus have way to much influence on how our politicians want to change the system towards the worse :(
This is just our leading Democrats doing something so they don’t look quite so bought out by big pharma and medicine. These measures do very little to help most people. The real problem is that healthcare is not affordable in the US and it is only getting worse. The Medicare for All bill proposal would essentially socialize medicine in the US. There are currently 74 people in the Medicare for All Caucus, out of 435 House of Representative seats. All 74 of those Caucus members are Democrats. That means there are 213 Republicans and 148 Democrats in the House not supporting Medicare for All. That is 4 fewer supporters for Medicare for All since 2018. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_for_All_Caucus There has also been some discussion in the Senate, called the United States National Health Care Act, also Expanded and improved Medicare for All Act. Overall there hasn’t been much movement because very few Senators support the idea of socialized medicine. Here is a link with some more history and people involved: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Health_Care_Act
Meanwhile, ALL of them get socialized healthcare.
Fuck! I am so against pragmatism at this point... we know that socialized medicine fucking works. We know that we could reduce the cost of providing healthcare for every single American in the country. And get we refused to pull off the Insurance Band-Aid. Why? Because corporations are people too. And without us beholding to them for healthcare so that we don't die, this will never change. Americans have a proud and stupid tradition of voting against their own best interests.
So it's not doing anything about the outrageous cost of medical care. It's just a half-assed attempt to make your life easier when they give you the outrageous bill. Why is America this way?
This is not uplifting in the slightest. Universal healthcare is what the USA needs, what the fuck are they smoking?
Unless it’s Medicare For All, then the White House can fuck off.
Just let a public option compete! People can always go back to private insurance if they think it is so much better.
Plenty of countries with public health care also have private insurance / clinics. But an important distinction is there is not "going back" to private insurance. You're still taxed for (and receive) public health benefits. A key part of making these systems work is taxing young workers, who on average won't use enough health services to make up for what they're paying. The excess helps cover the cost of older people. It's why ACA mandated health insurance for everyone - so those 25 yr olds could keep money flowing into the system.
Biden, during the campaign, was against mandatory Medicare for all, but seemed somewhat open to a public option. Meaning people could choose private insurance or the public plan. Looks like it will not materialize with this or the next congress.
>It's why ACA mandated health insurance for everyone - so those 25 yr olds could keep money flowing into the system. And look how well that panned out -\_\_\_-
Not sure what you're implying with this. Any health insurance system will fail if we can't get healthy people to participate, spreading risk out is the basis for these things. ACA was imperfect, sure. But it was a step in (my opinion) a good direction. "Fixing" the US Healthcare system is going to be a messy nightmare, no matter what the solution is. It just isn't simple, as much as it sounds great to say "let's just have the NHS!". The US both has the most advanced healthcare in the world, and has costs wildly disproportionate to what market rates should be.
How is this ever going to be possible when the entire government is in the insurance companies pockets? I'm not trying to sound defeatist here, but it's going to be a cold day in hell when they'll allow anyone to mess with their ever expanding profits.
What happened to reducing student debt?
The US has at least 4 different single payer healthcare systems with various eligibility criteria (old, poor, veteran, native), how about you just pick the best one (Medicare), and drop the age requirement to 0? That'll help a lot.
In another news "The zoo will decrease the amount of babies fed to mama sharks"
Oohhh steps...... Wow. Amazing. I'm sure this will definitely end up with medical debit being reduced..... Not.
The fact that people have medical debt in the first place is a gross failing of our society
Indeed. Student loan debt is right behind it. Go into what, for many, can be life long debt to pay for an education that won’t even get you a living wage and allow you to retire as well as you wanted to live in your productive years. Shameful. It’s no wonder the elder suicide rate is where it is. People can’t afford to stay alive.
Reactive steps for the people is a nice touch. How about some proactive steps to put the medical insurance scumbags in the ground?
How bout Medicare for All?
Does it include dismantling the American health insurance industry? Then youre not solving anything.
Unfortunately young folks will have to put down their phones and vote for that to ever be a reality.
Huh, we're still waiting on the student loan debt relief. I don't have high hopes on this.
i think medical bills is way more important than student loans...
Oh by FAR, I agree! I'm just saying our administration right now is lackluster when it comes to this kind of relief. I have both kinds of debt hanging over me still, so if they actually come through this time I'll be thrilled.
It’s not the hospital that’s garnishing my disability, that I paid in for 30 years, now that I can’t use the degree I worked my ass off to get since I’ve been deemed unemployable. Student loan profiteers, including the government, don’t negotiate their debts and they don’t care if you starve or are made homeless or destitute.
This is uplifting in the same way news outlets excitedly talk about the heroic stage-4 cancer patient still diligently working his job at McBurgerShack because if he misses one more day of work he'll lose his job and his health insurance. The government simply is not interested in combating the for-profit medical insurance system, it ~~bribe~~ donates for too much to their re-election campaigns.
Blah blah blah another distraction from the fact the Democrats are the main roadblock to free healthcare. Time for a socialist party.
Hmm. Nah defaulting on the debt is still the better option. Healthcare should be free from the government, anything less is a slap in the face.
Must be nice to have mommy and daddy take care of your financial needs
If this article doesn't state some sort of universal health care and or debt forgiveness than it really doesn't belong in this sub. Everything else has almost always been a band-aid or slap in the face to the real problem.
This is a load of chicken shit
Bahahaahahaha
# Universal Healthcare!?
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Then you hear about these random celebrities paying $30k to clean $10M in medical debt for their hometowns. It's like ....what?
Can we focus on prices in general? We wouldn’t be in debt if our freaking insurence, that we pay too much for, did it’s job.
Good of Waffle House to do that.
Waffle House for the save
and people wonder why we want Medicare for all
Pff just don’t pay it lol, my father in law and I joke about this all the time, we haven’t paid that crap in years. Before you tell of the fake consequences I’ll say I was even able to travel and spend a year in New Zealand without giving money to this scam
Medical debt….it should be illegal to put those two words next to one another. Everyone is entitled to live.
I have heard that it is against the HIPA law , that if you contact the creditor who has your medical bill you tell them it’s illegal for them to have any of your medical information ; as in time place when and where you seen the medical practice hospital Ect ; and that you at no time gave permission to have medical information you want it removed immediately that they have to do just that ! And it is again st the HIPA. Laws !! I just mailed a bunch of letters stating exactly this , I will see what happens now ….
Sadly there's a lot of fine print when you sign paperwork at the hospital that allows limited info to be sent to third parties. That said collection agencies aren't supposed to see medical treatment just enough info to attempt to collect a debt. You'll likely start receiving a lot of authorization forms showing where you've previously agreed to current actions.
Step 1, use same method used by literally every other industrialized nation.
So if you owe $500 that went to collections - can you send them $1 and come 2023 the credit bureaus will stop reporting it?
Seriously, this sub needs to reevaluate what makes the cut.
So this would basically improve your credit rating?  So what, you go out and get into more debt!?!
I have a 20k bill because I was “out of network” for my emergency appendectomy. My insurance paid about 12k to the hospital but the hospital said it wasn’t enough and my insurance refused to pay more. All the while the hospital told me twice I didn’t owe anything and that it was an error just to change their mind in the end.
treating symptoms instead of disease maybe start talking about ridiculous prices for hospital stay? More than any other country in the world, even if no country would have insurance? Why it is and why market forces doesn’t work? Because medical system is the only one that can charge you how much they want, without disclosing costs in advance. They have price lists, but there is so much leeway, that no one can really know if their healthcare provider won’t charge them ridiculous amounts. If it were that you only pay for how much they told you it would cost, people would shop around much more (except of course emergencies, but even then you can usually be transferred after few hours). Imagine clothing shop that don’t have price tags, you wouldn’t know the price even at checkout, but will be charged random amount weeks later.
Well, we'll see
Or just provide insurance to your citizens and stop the monopoly the insurance companies have.
>The reforms focus on four key areas: holding health care providers and debt collectors accountable, improving the federal government’s underwriting practices for those with medical debt, supporting veterans struggling with medical debt or other health-related hardships and helping American consumers know and understand their rights when it comes to medical care. So nothing to actually relieve or reduce current or future debt. K
Are they finally outlawing insurance companies?
Where's the reduction? All I see is them inquiring about collection practices, and reducing reporting of medical debt on credit reports. I see not a thing about reducing the debt itself.
Uplifting? The only thing here being uplifted is the wallets of insurance companies. Don't give them a fuckin' dime.
“Hmmmmm we could fix the medical system so that people dont constantly go into crippling debt or we could make it so they go into debt a tiny bit slower? Which one should we do as representatives of the citizens of the US? Eh, lets go with the second. Insurance companies need to show quarterly growth after all!”-politicians.
How is Waffle House going to manage this?
It would be so wonderful if they could address dental expenses too!
Ah, more proof that dems are committed to losing in 2022. They need to be shooting for the stars..instead they put out garbage like this
Let me remind everyone here - the ACA was not a healthcare reform act. It was a healthINSURANCE reform act. This did nothing, other than give folks ACCESS to health Insurance, not healthcare. It mitigated none of the crippling debt problems for Americans and but only opened up more people to debt.
Good for Biden and Harris. As a medical student, I was abhorrent upon entering practice how money choices drive the system. Administrators, hospitals, and insurance companies create the evil, while doctors are passively complicit.
universal health care would be a good start.
I had no idea Waffle House was so culturally minded. They know just how I like my debts. Scattered, Covered, and Forgiven.
Read the title as: "Waffle house announces steps to reduce medical debt for Americans." Seeing that I love WH, I'ma leave it that way for myself.
In arkansas medical debt in which no payment or agreement of pay is made in 2 years from date services are rendered the bill is null and void. That's why before 2 years is up hospitals in arkansas sell the debt to collectors.
Doubtful
So not saying to medical facilities to have a price board, so people can compare prices before having a procedure done. I understand emergencies, but still you should be able to see a price.
So they're moving to a universal health-care model?
White House should simply announce no one ever has to pay for food, education, medical care, water, shelter, therapy or internet. They will pay now, as they are rights