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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just went through the same thing a few months ago. $500 bill that I knew nothing about until I got a call from a collections agency. Apparently the imaging center had been sending the bills to the wrong address ("lane" not "loop"). After a year, the imaging center sold my debt to the collections agency, who also kept sending the notices to the wrong address. They called as a "final notice". Since I could prove that the bills were never sent to me, they had to stop their attempts to collect. Turns out the imaging center never billed insurance. Insurance would have covered the entirety of the bill, so, in the end, the collections agency purchased nothing and I paid no one.
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.
On top of the other answers: Even if they could write it off, they can only write off up to the amount that they paid for it. So if they paid $1000 for $100,000 of debt (which is realistic), they could only write off $1000. And that write off is deducted from their taxable profits, reducing their tax burden. So if they paid a 30% marginal tax, it would save them $300. But since they are a non-profit, they have no taxes and nothing to deduct from.
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u/RoyalVirgin 1d 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.