My ex had collectors calling her several times a day for months while she was disputing a bill. It probably depends on whether the hospital writes the bill off or sells it to
collectors.
I cannot imagine how infuriated I would be if I were being punished on my credit for someone else’s clerical error.
the same happened to my ex. Something had gone wrong between hospital and insurance and both refused to fix it. Which left her in between trying to figure this out while trying to recover. It's really infuriating that they can treat people that way. Once you experience this together with billing for things that never happened and insurance refusing things they have to cover, you can only conclude that insurances and hospitals are basically fraudsters that for some reason are allowed to get away with it.
Why do other people pay bills they receive in the mail?
The practice and billing parts of the system are usually mostly separate, so the person checking you in for your appointments may not know or have any way to see that you have unpaid bills and you won't necessarily be denied care for it, but there's no real standard here either.