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Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

You have my condolences. My brother and I ended up hiring a lawyer to handle our dad's estate, and I'd recommend it to anyone. She did things like send the hospital a letter that said in essence "give me a single bill with a total for all services provided at your hospital. If it's not on this bill I'm not going to pay it."

(Although legal fees for estates are capped here in Ohio, not sure if that's true where you are.)

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> She did things like send the hospital a letter that said in essence "give me a single bill with a total for all services provided at your hospital. If it's not on this bill I'm not going to pay it."

That is a great thing to say, but does it actually hold any weight? Or is it like the construction trucks that have signs saying they are not responsible for damage from items blown off them?

The billing department can call your bluff, then get in line in probate court to get paid. Possibly years down the road depending on how long it takes. Keep in mind hospital bills are just a fantasy, I've received bills >$50,000 US for less than 1 hour in the hospital.

> Keep in mind hospital bills are just a fantasy, I've received bills >$50,000 US for less than 1 hour in the hospital.

Then it makes even more sense to do that.

Not really, same idea. Hospitals want to recover as much as they can with as little headache. Coming from a lawyer vs trying to negotiate yourself just means "I can actually make this difficult for you, play ball"

In the case of a death or bankruptcy, yes it does work. There is a hard cutoff date and if they miss it the debt is uncollectible.

It does not work for the living.

I should have been more specific, or understood the question more generally as "can you actually negotiate with the hospital on your bills?"

You can do this, even as a living person. I once got a $10k bill reduced to $700. (It took a lot of back-and-forth, but it was worth it.)

We're about to find out too. Dad passed 8 months ago; we got a $1500 hospital bill last week (just after the probate window closed) w/o explanation or description of services rendered.

That sounds to me like the hospital screwed up and is asking for charity. If the probate window is closed before they sent the bill (check the postmark date), then I don't think you owe them anything.

Seems plausible to me, during bankruptcy or winding down of a company the same happens. If you miss your chance to join the list of creditors then the money has already been disbursed and there's nobody responsible for making you whole. Of course there are a lot of rules and details. A death is like a bankruptcy in that assets are used to pay for debts and remaining debts don't get inherited.

Well, it worked in the case of my dad's estate.

I think the fact that it was from a lawyer made a difference. I had a different situation with Wells Fargo where I quoted their own document back to them and they still denied me. When I got a lawyer to send essentially the same letter, but with his letterhead, they suddenly bent over backwards to help me out, going above and beyond their obligations.

That's because most companies operate their customer support at extremely basic level and hope that those with complex needs will simply give up in frustration.

A lawyer letterhead short-circuits that because companies fear that someone who is actually willing to pay upfront for a lawyer is also going to follow through with a lawsuit or, worse, a complaint to the regulatory agency so they'll kiss asses beyond belief just to prevent a case from ever reaching public record and a resulting bad image in the eyes of the regulator who can actually impose pretty expensive fines.

Yeah, absolutely. In the Wells Fargo case, thousands of dollars were on the line, so it was absolutely worth the couple hundred dollars for the lawyer. But if I had been disputing a $50 overdraft fee or something like that, I'm not sure what I would have done.

(I might contact the CFPB these days, but I think this incident was before they existed.)

The CFPB is completely useless. I've never received a worthwhile response to any complaint I submitted through them, out of the ten or so complaints I've submitted to them in the last ~decade.

They simply forward your complaint to the same barely-literate customer "service" department that created the problem in the first place, so that someone who doesn't understand the problem can cut-and-paste their original response back to you again.

You're given an opportunity to respond after that. You get no response if you explain why the bank's reply wasn't responsive to your complaint. I also once tried cutting-and-pasting several paragraphs of hard-core gay erotic Star Trek fan-fiction (searching-and-replacing one of the main characters' names for that of the bank's CEO, with a note that said, "this is to test if anyone actually reads this"), hoping to get the bank or CFPB to even acknowledge me in a non-automated fashion. I got no indication that they did; not even a "please don't do that again." (I wasn't bold enough to try death threats or child porn, but I'd wager even those would be ignored.)

I wrote my senators and representative in Congress, asking them why the CFPB seemingly ignored complaints. One of them CC'd me on a letter to the CFPB requesting someone contact me. Noone ever did. As far as I can tell, the entire agency is just a black hole for wasting tax dollars, likely a graft to help ex-bank employees collect Federal paychecks and pensions while doing nothing and claiming to be working on "reform."

> I also once tried cutting-and-pasting several paragraphs of hard-core gay erotic Star Trek fan-fiction

holy shit lmao

> I also once tried cutting-and-pasting several paragraphs of hard-core gay erotic Star Trek fan-fiction

Ballsy move

“Do you always fly at the ~~ladies~~ guys at Warp 10, Ensign?”

I've done similar to this and it has worked. You dump the onus onto them. If they don't explicitly reject it then they've tacitly accepted it, and you've got it in writing too.

In the US that sounds roughly consistent with part of the probate process, which is the way that estates are closed out.

More or less you publish a letter in a journal of record saying legal boilerplate to the effect of 'so and so has died, if they owed you money now is the time to bring it up'. Any claims on the estate not brought up timely will more or less be extinguished, the estate is eventually closed, and life goes on.

It’s nice to know bankruptcy at least works when I die

The "weight" in the situation is good ol' fashioned incentive. The patient in question is dead, and the estate attorney is wrapping up business. After a certain date, there won't be an entity to collect from. Relatives of the deceased are not liable for medical debts (that doesn't mean the medical provider won't try to collect it from relatives, though).

So the medical provider faces two distinct choices:

A.) Get their act together and get paid a guaranteed sum from an estate that has been established by a professional entity

B.) Hem and haw, miss the boat, and try to collect from an estate that's run dry because the money has been dispersed to relatives and/or try to goad relatives into paying. Sometimes, those relatives don't exist.

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