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Hospital Bills - Blog Posts
“Most hospitals in America are non-profits, which means they must have financial assistance or Charity Care policies. This is gonna sound weird, but what that means is that if you make under a certain amount of money, the hospital legally has to forgive your hospital bills. Let me show you how this works. Type in the hospital name with ‘financial assistance’ after. Should be the top link. Let’s check. What you wanna do is look for financial assistance applications and policies. Let’s check the policy. From here, what you’re looking for is a sliding scale of benefits. 0-300% of the poverty guidelines, they will forgive 100% of your medical bills. So you can see here that 300% is $37,470, so if you make under that amount, the hospital will legally forgive your medical bills. If you’re a larger household, you can check it out from here. If you wanna test it out, I run a non-profit that does this so DM me, and I will actually do it for you, and see if we can crush those medical bills.” The guy’s Tiktok handle is @dollarfor.
The majority of my immediate fam works for hospitals and had no idea this was a thing. I find that insane but not at all surprising. Of course, there are probably all sorts of loopholes or requirements depending on the hospital or what sorta medical insurance you have. This might be helpful to check out.
Before you pay that not-covered hospital bill:
I want to take a min to spread awareness for the No Surprises Act after noticing a reddit post earlier.
This protection for patients just popped up in the past couple years, and the one major downside is that it's up to the patients to speak up to make use of it, but not everyone knows what it is.
"If you have private health insurance, these new protections ban the most common types of surprise bills. If you’re uninsured or you decide not to use your health insurance for a service, under these protections, you can often get a good faith estimate of the cost of your care up front, before your visit."
Consumer fact sheet
Typically, health insurance companies will help pay for bills from "in-network" providers, AKA their VIP inner circle gang turf. They won't help pay if you get medical care from another gang's henchmen (out of network).
This means that sometimes, a person would go to the hospital, which they knew had been covered by their insurance before, so they expect it's going to be relatively affordable. But they didn't know that multiple medical "gangs" were working in the same hospital. Their anesthesiologist, for example, was from a different gang. That specialist was out of network even though the surgeon and nurses were all in network.
Boom. Big bill for thousands of dollars and their insurance refuses to help pay it.
But now we have this law! The No Surprises Act means that insurance companies need to cover "surprise" expenses (under certain conditions).
If you don't have health insurance, hospitals and clinics need to give you an accurate quote before you get services, then foot the bill if they were too far off the mark.
The Fact Sheet section of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services have some wonderful user-friendly resources for you about health insurance and how this act works.
Keep in mind that Medicare and government-run programs always have weird rules for everything, so you might have different (yet similar) protections through those programs.
If you have a medical bill that wasn't covered by insurance and you think it might count as a surprise bill, please check out your rights and consider fighting it instead of letting it become a stressful expense or debt you can't repay.
Go here to start figuring things out for your situation:
Health insurance companies have way, waaaaay too much power over our lives. We need every drop of protection we can get - but it only counts as much as we can understand and use those protections!
How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke
It’s a fucking travesty that the leading cause of bankruptcy in these United States is medical bills. Not credit card bills nor risky investments. Not even student loans, but hospital bills. Invoices racked up through freak accidents and diseases the patient certainly didn’t ask for and would probably prefer to live without.
To our readers in other, more civilized countries, you’re dismissed. This week we’re going to be dissecting a uniquely American problem: exorbitant medical bills and how to pay them.
The CEO of GoFundMe, an online crowd-funding platform, never dreamed that his company would become synonymous with “I’m broke and need $300,000 to pay for my child’s cancer treatment.” What he envisioned as a way for entrepreneurs and artists to raise money for their passion projects has become the last desperate hope of sick and injured Americans on the verge of total financial ruin.
It blows, dear readers. It fucking blows.
Keep reading.
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