What Happens When Americans Don’t Pay a Hospital Bill | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When Americans Don’t Pay a Hospital Bill

theatlantic.com

23 pointshrasyid6 comments

I realized that what will finally cause this system to change is when everyone stops paying these insane medical bills. Because they can't, and no longer even care about mortgages. I think that day is very near indeed...

To fix healthcare, we need to gut the health insurance industry like a fish.

One part of the article that I noticed particularly was the line about "some hospitals and doctors offices sell their debt to debt buyers, who pay pennies for each dollar owed...".

There's an organization called RIP Medical Debt that takes donations, uses the money to buy medical debt, then forgives the debt, which (should) clear any credit rating problems. John Oliver even covered the issue on one of his programs, and mentioned RIP Medical Debt. His program then donated enough money to clear millions of dollars in medical debt.

After seeing this comment and the reference to RIP Medical Debt, I got curious and was Googling around about this and came across this article: https://blog.credit.com/2016/06/john-oliver-follow-up-146870...

Looks like there are some questions that still needs to be answered about whether this is necessary and if there are still consequences (like tax) for doing so.

Is it true that in the US that medical bills don't impact your credit if you are making payments -- even $1/month? If so, I don't quite understand why people would go bankrupt from medical bills. Am I misunderstanding somehow?

My experience has been that the hospital sets up the monthly payment amount (sometimes with varying plan options). You can't partially pay, and the payment amount is a simple ($total / plan term). Paying $1 isn't really an option.

The last medical bill my family had was something like $3500 and the longest term the hospital offered was 6 months, at $580/mo.

I'm sure they're not all the same, but I could certainly see an unexpected $580/mo being able to cripple a family living paycheck to paycheck.

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