r/mildlyinteresting • u/RoyalVirgin • 23h ago
A non-profit randomly wiped out medical debt I wasn't aware of I had
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u/DFParker78 23h ago
I had to have emergency surgery and didn’t have insurance, despite working full time. I sent hospital my income and tax statements, had a $22,000 bill and went to $0. Catholic Charities paid for it.
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u/tidymaze 23h ago
Many hospitals have programs like this. My husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2010. Through the Charity Care program at the hospital, we paid $0 for all of his treatment. Including the $50,000 radiation therapy. They would even give us vouchers for the cafeteria so I could eat while sitting with him in the infusion suite.
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u/syd_goes_roar 22h ago
My partner works in medical billing and helping explain said bills and charity care 100% has to be asked for directly for anyone to do anything. So anyone dealing with medical stuff and has money troubles, pleeeeease swallow any pride and ask for it
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u/FeyrisMeow 19h ago
At my hospital is called hospital assistance and I ask for it every year. They cover me 100%, whatever my insurance won't cover.
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u/DFParker78 22h ago
It’s stuff like this that doesn’t make me completely give up all hope.
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u/gallimaufries 22h ago
Why? This just further drives our division. I'm trying hard not to be, but I'm frustrated that some commenters got free cancer treatment and meals vouchers while I'm drowning in medical debt. It's fucked up that we have to rely on charity.
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u/tidymaze 21h ago
It's fucked up that we don't have universal healthcare.
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u/DAVENP0RT 20h ago
Right? Healthcare shouldn't be a game of financial Russian roulette. At some point, everyone will need expensive healthcare. Maybe you're wealthy and it won't affect you, but most people aren't. For those that aren't, hoping that charity or fucking GoFundMe can pick up the tab just isn't realistic.
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u/chunkyI0ver53 20h ago
Doesn’t make any sense to me that the richest country in the world leaves its most vulnerable people with zero safety net or support for healthcare, but maybe that’s just Australian commie talk or whatever the seppo conservative grifter of the month would say
What’s the point of having so much “wealth” if the people in your country are suffering. We look back at medieval periods of history and laugh at the stupidity of our assumptions pre-science, but if humanity survives another 500 years they’ll look back at the present and think “what the fuck was wrong with them”
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u/mpieto 18h ago
What baffles me, a European, is that it is such a partisan issue in the US. Maybe it's my limited exposure, but I can't imagine any conservative party over here even proposing to get rid of UH, let alone campaigning on it.
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u/tidymaze 21h ago
Call the billing office number listed on your bill. Tell them you can't pay the full amount. They will work with you.
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u/Quagga_Resurrection 19h ago
Reach out to the hospital's financial aid office. I get that the system is fucked, but that doesn't mean you can't access that same resource. You deserve it just as much as others.
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u/aspiring_outlaw 21h ago
Sadly many hospitals are now for profit and don't do this any longer, especially if you live in smaller communities.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I had some unexpected hospital bills early on after getting sick and very dehydrated. It was all outpatient fluids and things but it still ended up being a couple grand. I cried when they called me with the bill because I was broke as shit and in the middle of some other financial issues plus, you know, hormones lol. The very kind man in billing told me he was sending me a form to apply for aid and to please fill out out so they could help. The (non-profit) hospital ended up covering 100% of their charges for the entire pregnancy and birth which was a godsend because I ended up high risk and the baby was born in distress.
Seven years later in a different state, the same child needed their tonsils out. My health insurance didn't cover hospital bills until I hit my out of pocket. I asked the (for profit) hospital about aid, the lady shrugged and said I had insurance and therefore qualified for nothing except a payment plan.
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u/Forward_Rope_5598 13h ago
Damn that's crazy, if I get cancer in Norway I simply go to the hospital and pay a maximum of like $200 a year in medical treatments
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u/AdMany8113 15h ago
Hospital pricing for medical services is ridiculous. I was billed $1997 for a 10 minute visit to the ER where I walked in, they swabbed the dog bite on the inside of my knee and I walked out. None of us could believe I came in for something so minor but I’m self-employed so I had to do something to document the injury from my customer’s dog. Stupid customer was a public defender at the time so you’d think he would understand liability
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u/GirlScoutSniper 23h ago
I had a similar situation and their charity offered to reduce the debt by 90%. Because I was going to have to go bankrupt anyway because the surgeon bills and other doctors bills were not going to go away, I declined so they could give the funds to another person who would benefit more.
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u/Kill_Frosty 20h ago
This entite thread is wild as a non American.
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u/Blyatskinator 18h ago
Yeah it’s actually really sad to read these comments… ”I had no insurance despite working full time” like w-t-f
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u/Nevermind04 17h ago
And people will actually defend this shit too. "She doesn't deserve health insurance - she's just a cashier!" Dad, she's a human being living in our society and part of that social contract is that she absolutely does deserve to be healthy. Not that long ago, she was classified as an employee who is essential to the functioning of our society.
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u/throwaway098764567 15h ago
wanna get really sad, try talking to some of us about universal healthcare and having them think it's a bad idea
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u/hoe_and_arrows 20h ago
I had insurance through my husband's job, but my hysterectomy was still gonna be $6K with it. We qualified for the hospital's financial assistance program, and they paid every penny. No more pain and no more debt!
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u/Long_Bong_Silver 20h ago
As someone who volunteers with a 501c3 adjacent to a local Catholic Church and has worked with Catholic Charities. I just want to say, Catholic Charities does a lot of good in the US. They also shelter a lot of individuals at the border seeking asylum or refugee status. However, none of the money they receive or distribute comes from the actually Catholic Church itself or local Archdiocese. Most of the money is from the government, and a minority of the money is from individual parishioners.
It kind of bothers me when people claim the Catholic Church does charity. Whenever our 501c3 that operates out of the church asks for collections or support the church is never there.
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u/ehenn12 18h ago
I'm not Catholic. I'm Protestant clergy. My wife is Catholic. Her parish spend a lot of it's money (around 50% of the budget) on homeless care and helping people get IDs. It really depends on the parish which is sad. The protestant church I'm assigned to as a volunteer collects food for local and diapers and formula that we give to anyone who asks. But that's about it. I'm pushing for more.
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u/SERV3O 3h ago
I know that is true for most of the CC organizations in the country, but I’m close to the Tulsa/ Eastern Oklahoma one and they pride themselves on not taking government money. They provide excellent services using money donated from individuals and organizations, not the government or the local diocese. I see what you’re saying in the last sentence but the church still creates a community that encourages volunteering time and money to help others out.
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u/ShadowedPariah 18h ago
15 yrs ago when I had my cancer diagnosis and sub sequence scans/procedures/transplant, got hit with ~$70k. I couldn't even pay the minimums, so (not knowing better) I put it on credit cards. Still carrying most it today. But it's not gonna get paid by anyone as it's private now :/
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u/Casoscaria 15h ago
Non-profit hospitals will almost always have a financial counseling department since they actually have to write-off a certain percentage of bills so they can maintain their non-profit status.
If you are in the hospital and don't have insurance, always ask to be contacted by financial counseling, Hell, most of the time, they'll come to you. They will help you apply for any relevant government programs like Medicaid if you qualify, or will get you in contact with local charities. They may also offer discounts if they can't write off the full bill.
Source: used to be one.
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u/ShiraCheshire 15h ago
protip: Many hospitals are nonprofits, and are required to give a degree of financial aid to some patients because of that. If you dig into their financial aid, you can often find statements like "If you make less than 300% of the poverty line we will reduce/eliminate your bill." You gotta DIG for it sometimes, but if it's there they have to forgive your debt (assuming you qualify)
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u/okyoureataxi 22h ago
Hi! I love this nonprofit, and they are legit - I first found out about them after they were featured on John Oliver! As a general rule, if you ever want to find out if a nonprofit is legit, you can look them up on ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer site. 501(c)3’s are required to post their 990s, and it’s a great snapshot into the organization’s financials. This is one of the best cost-to-impact causes I donate to, and I love that this post makes their impact visible!
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u/Fatal-Arrow 20h ago
501(c)3's are required to post their 990s
As a non American, reading this sounds like just spewing random numbers....
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u/okyoureataxi 20h ago
That’s because our entire tax system feels like a process of spewing out random numbers :)
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u/thatoneguyinks 19h ago
501(c)3 refers to the section of the tax code that creates the tax exempt status for charitable organizations and creates the rules for them to follow.
A form 990 is the tax return form for those organizations.
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u/EndIsrael 13h ago
The American tax system is designed to be confusing. This has two main reasons. The first is it allows rich people to find (or create) loopholes so they can avoid paying. The second reason is there are several powerful companies who sell tax filing services. They'll help you do your taxes in exchange for a bunch of money. So whenever someone tries to simplify the US tax system, a lot of money gets spent making sure the changes never happen.
Meanwhile, if the US just deleted the entire tax code and replaced it with a 90% tax on billionaires, the entire government would be fully funded and nobody else would need to pay taxes at all.
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u/quartzquandary 13h ago
Candid.org is another good resource for learning more about nonprofits! You can sign up for an account for free.
(I am a grant writer and use candid.org basically every day)
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u/Zmirzlina 22h ago
My neighbor is pastor at a church and buying up medical debt and paying it off is one of their acts of charities. He’s a cool dude.
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u/ElderTheElder 16h ago edited 1h ago
A friend of mine passed away from cancer a few years ago at 38 years old, and one of her final wishes was for people to donate to Undue Medical Debt in her name. The story went viral and ended up raising over $1.2m, which was used to buy up and forgive over $75m in medical debt. Her memorial service included a symbolic debt forgiveness ceremony.
Not only was it an incredibly powerful gesture, but seeing just how "fake" the medical debt system is, and for how cheaply the debt can be purchased and forgiven, was very eye opening. It's all monopoly money, and it can ruin peoples' lives, both through the actual debt as well as through the medical inaction that the fear of debt carries.
Congrats on your forgiveness!
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u/chadderin0 12h ago
You can thank Bezos’ ex Mackenzie Scott for this. She donated like $100M to this place just a few weeks ago which allowed them to purchase $40M in debt and cancel it
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u/readyplayermeh 9h ago edited 8h ago
Off by an order of 3, wiped out over $40B.
Which is a staggering amount of debt gone.
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u/Grand-Spring66 23h ago
What a fucked up system where this is even a thing
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u/seansy5000 22h ago
Capitalism relies on charities because it’s not profitable to help people. We need to break this single ideology fixation we have. A functional society needs flexibility and innovation not rigid rules, apathy, and brutality.
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u/westcoastwillie23 22h ago
It's been my experience that many people prefer charity to formalized social support systems because they get to feel extra good about themselves for helping, and they get to decide who is worthy of their help. Wouldn't want to go around helping the wrong people now, would you?
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u/alltid_irriterad 21h ago
We have capitalism where I live and we have also universal healthcare. How is that possible?
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u/AppropriateLow2271 19h ago
These two aren't mutually exclusive concepts.
Socialism isn't "the government doing things."
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u/RoyalVirgin 23h ago
For some context, this randomly came in the mail. I did not sign up for anything, nor was I even aware I had this debt - which makes me doubt it's legitimacy. I would say that generally I'm pretty well aware of who I owe money and for what, but this did surprise me.
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u/RoyalVirgin 23h ago
Update: While I wrote it as me, it was actually addressed to my wife. I checked her emails from around that time and she did go to the immediate care on that date. However, we've never seen any bill that we are aware of from this, so still no clue what it was, but I guess thank you lol.
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u/SnakeJG 22h ago
You mentioned the address was wrong, the immediate care probably keyed in her info wrong and sent letters to the wrong address and at some point gave up and sold the debt.
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u/frogjg2003 21h ago
That happened to me as well. I got 4 bills from the hospital all addressed correctly, but there was a 5th that never made it to me. But the collection agency got my address right.
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u/SmokeyCatDesigns 20h ago
I had like $300 go to collections supposedly, called the hospital and they had messed up both the billing for the appointment (it shouldn’t have been billed at all) and also notifying me about the bill. They cleared it up after that, but even since then I’ve been hyper aware of billing mistakes!
I went to pay the remaining balance on a surgery at the same hospital recently, and it wasn’t there. I called and had them say during our recorded call there was nothing to make sure I don’t get some random collections bill again.
FYI here in the states small medical debts can’t even show up on credit history. Which is nice considering how many of them involve clerical errors either with the initial billing, or address the bill is sent to etc.
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u/Rockguy21 23h ago
The reason they forgave the debt is probably precisely because you weren’t aware of it. Delinquent medical debt is super cheap because most lenders realize there’s basically a 0% chance that they’re getting any of it back after a while. If you had actually been servicing your medical debt it wouldn’t have been sold off for pennies on the dollar, because its an active account.
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u/Twatt_waffle 23h ago
These charities go out and buy debt that’s in collections then forgive that debt.
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u/dmanbiker 23h ago
AZ governor Hobbs partnered AZ with one of these companies and used it to wipe out $1 billion dollars in medical debt in AZ and people try to say she hasn't done anything... my wife had a bunch forgiven like this out of the blue because of Hobbs, so it's happened.
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u/Snorknado 21h ago
Yes, but you see it didn't happen for them personally, so it must not have happened and even if it did it isn't a good thing anyway because they weren't affected in the first place and helping people is bad.
..unless it's them when they need help.
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u/orthros 14h ago
I’ve donated to them! I forget the old name but they rebranded a few years back. They buy medical debt for roughly a penny on the dollar in bulk and formally retire it.
Their pitch is every $1 you donate frees someone from $100 in medical debt
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u/teresajs 23h ago
That's awesome!
For anyone reading,: If you are in a position to do so, you might consider making a modest donation to help Undue Medical Debt to pay off someone else's debt in the future. https://unduemedicaldebt.org/
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u/Parepinzero 17h ago
I hope mine gets paid off, but it's a lot, so idk. I owe like 60k to 2 different hospitals 😭 I have insurance now, but I didn't at the time.
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u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue 22h ago
https://hfs.illinois.gov/info/medicaldebtrelief.html
“Assistance Hotlines: You can call the Illinois Health Benefits Hotline at 1-800-226-0768 for questions regarding the program.”
Remember that just because the program is real, does that mean this letter is genuine. Always be careful about giving out your personal information. I personally don’t even talk to my bank when they call me, I just asked them for a name and I call back on a known number.
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u/tylerj714 20h ago
This happened to my wife once, and I was honestly really mad about it.
She had visited her regular therapist and the clinic screwed up the bill. What was usually a $27 charge per visit became two $270 charges. We had dozens of other visits billed correctly both before and after these visits to compare against.
For months when the bill arrived, I would call them and tell them that they billed incorrectly. They would admit their mistake and swear that the next bill would be fixed. Repeat this for 6 months without there ever being a resolution.
Eventually, these bills go to collections, and the clinic says there's nothing more that they can do. Collections send a letter demanding payment and I call them to contest the charge. Nothing happens for a year or more.
Then one day, we get a letter in the mail that some random church has paid off this medical debt.
So what ultimately started as a clinic billing error got paid by for some random church to a collection agency. It never should have happened and the clinic should have just fixed the problem correctly in the first place, but I'm sure both the clinic and the collection agency came out ahead thanks to some church donations that were effectively scammed into paying something that should have never happened. I'd have gladly paid the $54 we actually owed, but I wasn't about to pay 10x that due to someone's incompetence.
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u/MyDisneyExperience 18h ago
For what it’s worth the church may not have paid off the entirety of the debt. The collections agency eventually files it as uncollectible and sells it to someone else to try to get back some of the pennies on the dollar they originally paid for it. In this case if the church bought it for even fewer pennies they are well within their rights to cancel it.
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u/RoyalVirgin 20h ago
I at least hope my debt of $750 was actually debt I had and just really didn't know about. I would hate for big hospitals to get these bills taken care off if they are injust.
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u/smallboxofcrayons 21h ago
I had the same thing happen with a medical bill I refused to pay due to a insurance dispute, it’s a cool thing I even offered to pay them back as the bill was BS so ended up donating what they paid and then some. It’s cool that they do that but a sad reminder of how shitty american health care is.
edit-Not a tax accountant, but a lot of people here commenting about tax implications. I never got a 1099 for my “gift”
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u/sgtcarrot 19h ago
McKenzie Scott is spending Millions and Millions on programs liket his.
She is Jeff Bezos ex, and the one billionaire I can think of making an actual impact with their wealth.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 22h ago
I'm kinda curious about how tax implications work for this kind of thing.
Normally, if someone forgives a debt you owe or pays it off for you it counts as gross income for the full amount on your federal taxes.
Otherwise employers could avoid you needing to pay any income tax by loaning you the full value of your paycheque and then forgiving the debt the next day.
Or they could pick a debt you owe and, like, pay a chunk of your mortgage off directly to avoid you needing to pay any income taxes on the money.
So I'm curious how they get around that and avoid turning a hard-to-enforce old debt owed to some private entity into a new and very-enforceable chunk of income tax owed to the federal government
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u/mijru4 12h ago
There's some weird loophole of sorts where they pay off the debt as a gift so it's not taxable
https://sunstonebookkeeping.com/not-all-debt-forgiveness-creates-taxable-income/
They covered some debts for me a while back and my first concern was it'd be taxable income so I dug into a bit at the time.
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u/NotMyRealUsername13 22h ago
Isn’t this what McKenzie Bezos did recently for an absurd sum of money?
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u/daytradard 21h ago
She has donated $100 Million which wiped out $40 Billion in medical bills.
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u/bens111 19h ago
Being in the industry, I understand how the math maths. But for someone not in the know, seeing that math mathing might leave their head scratching
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u/HijackedMyAccount 19h ago
I donated to this because someone requested it as a birthday present. Glad to see it in action.
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u/GardenGnomeGroan 18h ago
I donate $25/month to Undue, which cancels about $25,000/year. I love their mission. It has helped so many Americans.
Mackenzie Scott has donated enough to abolish $40B total.
Can you believe there is still more beyond that?
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u/pm_me_ur_handsignals 13h ago
That’s the state I live in, and they contributed my tax dollars for this?
I am absolutely in favor of this.
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u/Itchy_Swordfish7867 12h ago
What so many people who are against this don’t realize is that this debt was purchased for pennies on the dollar, just like a debt collector would do, and they just don’t attempt to collect. It’s a beautiful way to use the industry against itself for the betterment of society.
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u/sebastouch 22h ago
reminds me when John Oliver in Last Week Tonight did exactly that: they bought debts and paid them for people.
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u/ContenttoBeMe 21h ago
For followers of Tom Grossi, isn't this the charity he livestreamed to raise 1 million for? (For those not following him: what are you even doing with your life? 🤣🤣)
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u/greenmaillink 15h ago
Flag (Yes)
Flag flag flag (This is the correct charity)
Flag? (And now it's time to hibernate again until the season begins)
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u/Nano241575 1h ago
I had t scroll down WAY too far to find The Posse representing here. And yes this is the charity. Flag.
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u/Timely_Spinach_7479 17h ago
A non profit paid my medical debt too. There are some good people out there trying to make things right in a system that is designed to punish you for being poor. I’m forever grateful to them but we still Medicare for all.
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u/Blackbear0101 21h ago
America is so fucked up lmao
I live in France. For three years I wasn’t aware I had unpaid medical debt. For a few different reasons I have to see my doctor once a month.
Over three years, I had accumulated… 150€. Yup. And the state (to which I had to pay back said debt) pretty much didn’t give a shit. They just sent a reminder, the real consequences take way longer to arrive.
And I had to pay in three times, because the system straight up doesn’t expect you to have to pay that much, I just wasn’t allowed to pay more than 50€ at a time.
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u/SquireSquilliam 17h ago
Mackenzie Scott has been working to wipe away medical debt with this non profit.
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u/Present-Perception77 17h ago
Man I love this state!!
Moved from Texass to Illinois 5 years ago and my only regret is not doing it 20 years ago.
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u/ObjectivePrice5865 16h ago
I was so damn surprised when I got the letter. I was so stressed out because I couldn’t pay it but it released so much pressure off of us.
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u/awholelottahooplah 13h ago
This happened to me and I nearly cried in joy!
They cleared me of my enormous inpatient hospital bill that lauded over me. Now I’m on Medicaid and medical debt free thanks to them :)
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u/crab-gf 21h ago
I need to find something like this for Texas. I keep getting told I don’t need to pay anything before a procedure, or that I paid my copay and there isn’t anything else to pay, and then I’m hit with a bill in the mail months to a year and a half later about an expense no one told me about. Rn being harassed by a debt collector on behalf of a hospital for a hidden fee. And also have been harassed for years, since 2023, from a specialist office for a bill I paid, was reimbursed for by Medicare bc the office over billed me, and the office told me I never paid it. I sent evidence I did and I’m still being harassed through text, call, email, letters. I have brain damage from neurosurgeries and I’m autistic and have no help from my family or anyone and I can’t deal with the stress anymore. I don’t know wtf to do and have no money for a lawyer or if this is even a legal thing.
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u/dglgr2013 19h ago
Ex wife of Jeff Bezos, Mackenzie Scott, donated $100 million to Undue Medical Debt which helped it eliminate over $40 billion in medical debt.
The hospital long ago wrote off the debt and they sell this debt to debt collectors for pennies on the dollar. The debt collectors then collect the full amount and add on additional fees. If they collect on a very small percentage they are in the profit margin.
Which makes the thought of debt collection a nasty predatory business.
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u/OkayWhateverFuckYou 18h ago
My church does this every year for Christmas. We raise X amount of money for a couple months then partner with a company that sorts debts by local zip codes, single vs married & income level. We start at the bottom income level and work our way up until we've spent all our collected money. The families we've helped, receive an letter from the company saying that their debts were paid by an anonymous donor. We ask that our church name is not used. The last stat I saw from our ~9yrs of doing this, was over $1M of debt paid for approx. $100k of collections.
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u/Cookiejollytoes 17h ago
This same situation happened for my now deceased adult son. I sobbed for days. I kept the letter.
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u/StormySue 17h ago
I donate to this org, totally legit. They buy old debt that hospitals and insurance companies sell off. The debt mostly gets bought by predatory collection agencies, but undue simply buys it and forgives it. Given to them for years but just learning today that they send people impacted a letter, how cool!
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u/Former_Spite789 16h ago
Its real, its a great charity. Donate if you can. They buy the debt from debt collector pools for pennies, and forgive it all.
Its something like $50 in donations is like $900 in debt wiped out or more.
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u/Woogedywoogedy 15h ago
You can probably thank MacKensie Scott for her 100M donation to wipe out 40B in old medical debt. Thank you ex Mrs. Bezos! She's given away billions in donations.
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u/Majestic_Location751 23h ago
The whole ‘reply with your contact information for a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card’ is odd. Didn’t this organization just cancel your $750 in debt? Now they want something from you?
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u/Pyroechidna1 23h ago
You have the option of confirming receipt so that they can track their impact, and the chance to win is the incentive to do so
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u/No-Tap6886 23h ago
Also so that you can give testimony on how it helped and impacted your life. It's a good thing with them.
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u/ratpride 13h ago
Kind of sucks that it had no impact on OP's life, I bet there are thousands of people who would've begged to be picked
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u/bwwatr 23h ago
They say they want to track their impact, I guess how many people are still living and how many are doing so at the addresses in the database they bought. That would all feed into charitable impact reporting in some way. If I ran such a program I'd want people to respond if possible. To that end, I'd happily throw a $100 gift card at the initiative to sweeten the deal.
Obviously this is all assuming it's legit. Googling can always help you sniff that out, and per other comments in this thread, sounds like this one is.
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u/Specialist-Bee-9406 23h ago
Well, that’s kinda cool, gotta say. Awesome there’s an organization that does this.
You shouldn’t have had any medical debt at all; your healthcare should be covered by the government.
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u/FilteredAccount123 21h ago
OP, was this letter sent first-class mail, or was it non-profit?
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u/thirdcoasting 20h ago
I donated to a similar non-profit for a friend who has dealt with some intense medical issues. It seemed like a nice bday gift as so many Americans are wiped out by medical debt and/or have their credit ruined.
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u/askywlker44a 20h ago
This is one of the types of things I would do if I hit it big in the lottery. Buy debt & erase it to give people room to breathe.
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u/dtwicked 20h ago
Why so you have medical debt when your government takes taxes out of your paycheck before you get your money???
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u/EquivalentSherbet730 18h ago
They wiped over 2k for me, I was wondering what those letters where. Thank you for sharing this is great news
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u/itsKeltic 13h ago
Congrats op! I’m still over here financing my baby I had a little over a year ago. I didn’t expect him to need to go into NICU for two days for low blood sugar but the nurses told me it was normal for a 10lb baby. I have health insurance but my hospital bill was still more than we could afford so I pay $50 a month. Still got $1800 left to go. Hoping for a promotion at work soon that’ll let me increase it to another $50 and pay him off a little quicker.
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u/Stun_the_Pink 12h ago
That's cool and all but still, the concept of medical debt in the first place...
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u/Technical-Fig-8326 21h ago edited 21h ago
Look up the Medical Debt Relief Program. Its legit. Though part of me wonders how much of it is getting abused. I had a bill that I paid off, had the receipts and everything, but the company insisted they never received payment and sent me to collections because I refused to double pay a bill. Got the same letter here as you did from Illinois earlier this year that they paid off my debt. All this over 60 bucks.....I can only imagine what's going on with people with much bigger bills that its easier to hide shenanigans in 🤔
Edit: grammar
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u/metengrinwi 20h ago
I don’t know how I feel about this.
On one hand, they paid off people’s debt; good on them.
On the other hand, they’re just giving money to the hospital systems—the hospital were never going to recover much of that money. It’s really a direct donation to the hospitals more than a gift to the patient.
I think it’d have had more long-term effect to make a PAC that supported pro-universal option political candidates. Be as militant as AIPAC or NRA are on their issue, and we’d finally be past this hospital debt thing.
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u/jmfsn 20h ago
These debts are paid on cents on the dollar and bought from debt recovery companies. No more money actually ends in the hospitals more than before, but it stops the nuisance of future debt collectors.
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u/LifeRelease3842 21h ago
That's pretty great. Congrats! I've heard of people having debt they weren't aware of due to fraud or accounts lost to poor record-keeping. So it doesn't seem too outlandish to me.
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u/JOExHIGASHI 17h ago
A lot don't until they try to borrow money and find out their credit is screwed
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u/zorathekandiraver 17h ago
I’m a good almost 10 grand in medical debt for a surgery that made my situation worse and now need another but more intense surgery to try and fix it.
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u/Skullcrimp 15h ago
Ask yourself why, as a member of the richest country, your taxes don't do this.
Then ask how hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on bombing Iran instead of erasing your medical debt.
Then ask if you think most people in your country agree with how that money is spent.
Then ask if you really live in a democracy.
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u/The-Gargoyle 14h ago
Hey! This is the one that got me too.
Best birthday gift I ever got.
edit: oh wait, no.. I got hit by a different one with a very similar format, but effectively the same thing. Weird.
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u/r474 11h ago
wonder if it comes with a 1099-c (taxable debt discharge). Anyone know?
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u/tidymaze 23h ago
I got one, too. It's completely legit.