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I think it's unethical that this can happen to people, so I justify my actions in these cases as an ethical opposition to being strongarmed: this happened to me when I was hospitalized for a heart palpitation that matched a side effect for medicine I was on as an emergency that, according to the medicine's documentation, warranted a 911 call. I turned out to be fine, yet my insurance company decided I owed a couple thousand bucks for the ordeal. I was doubtful and so when I got the bill (3 months later and very unexpectedly), I simply started making calls to get someone to justify me why it was my responsibility to pay the bill and not the insurance company's. The hospital said the insurance company already paid some ungodly amount of money for my bill and the bill was... some made-up clown world insurance company term. Copay, or payable, or deductible, or co-insurance. How many new daft words do they have today? This was 2015. Insurance company just didn't have clear answers. I read the policy, it was vague enough that I was arguing that the entire hospital visit should simply be 100% covered, I'm guessing the insurance company didn't have a way for their support staff to make the legal argument they'd have to make if I just straight up sued them for it. That's probably the only way to get a clear answer: sue, and get them to trot out a lawyer to say the justification to me. I honestly was happy to pay what I truly owed, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't overpaying, that's all. But lo, I lost the paper bill, and asked the hospital to send it again in the mail. They did, 6 weeks later. The account number on it was different than what I wrote down. I asked them to check. They sent another one, 6 weeks later, correct account number, my name mispelled. This comedy continued until the bill was sent to collections, a year after the original bill. The collections agency couldn't provide proof of debt, and it was sold again, to a different one. This one also couldn't provide proof of debt. 3 years later I'd still get random calls from some new debt collector. The original hospital had shut down, and so nobody could provably connect the debt they had bought with my phone number on it, to the identity of the person that walked into the hospital. I mean, honestly at this point I'm not even sure if there was a genuine mistake in billing: there's literally no way to know now. Regardless, I never paid the bill, and this remained my strategy for the miserable few remaining years I had to deal with the USA healthcare system: just make some phone calls and the bureaucracy will get so tangled up in itself it seems I could continually just slip through the cracks unscathed. Before anyone asks, nope, the unpaid bills never showed up on my credit report. |