Many attorneys will provide a free or very low cost initial consultation; you may have an unrealistic picture of what the actual cost of legal services for this particular scenario would be, and may benefit from actually finding out before assuming they are too expensive.

> you may have an unrealistic picture of what the actual cost of legal services for this particular scenario would be

I agree, I do, which is why I tried making my statement as much a question as possible. I am unaware that attorney's would fight for cases like this, if they are more common and do not lead to lawsuits.

Attorneys have a reputation of charging $600 a visit, much like the hospital bills one is trying to escape.

I paid my last attorney around $250 per hour and was very satisfied. Something like this might only be a couple of hours. Have an initial meeting with the attorney (usually free). They'll develop a strategy with you, in this case it would probably be to document the situation and send a letter explaining that a lawyer is engaged. Then the whole thing might stop there.

Some attorneys will actually answer the phone and have a small conversation. Maybe it's rare or different for healthcare issues, but I've made that phone call before. I politely asked a few questions and that was it.

I have no evidence other than a person that works in claims for an insurance company looked at my claim, drafted a letter citing relevant statutes and the bill went away.

I agree that an attorney only makes sense if you're facing a significant bill. On a smaller bill I would go to the hospital billing department and negotiate.

If you have excellent credit you can simply not pay and make them do the work. I had a $1500 dispute. I was getting tired of wasting time. When it went to collections I drafted the standard leave me alone. The funny thing is now the collection company has screwed up twice on some things. It is their prerogative to sue. I doubt they will. If they do it, it will be annoying but I can respond in kind with a countersuit. Oh and the credit score? Dropped about 40 points into the upper 700s. Annoying, but not worth just rolling over and paying.

You can of course negotiate as well.

Agreed, this is just part of business for hospitals. We as honest people feel ashamed if we cannot pay bills. But I make an exception medical bills and other unpredictable broken industries (if any).

If someone bought a car or house, they knew their obligations exactly. If they declare bankruptcy, I would lay some fault with them, if not all.

But with medical billing, you cannot get a straight answer. If they cannot tell you what a simple procedure would cost you, then you don't owe them anything.

Also hopefully if enough people don't pay surprise bills, then medical industry would have motivation to simplify their systems.

You'd hope they would simplify their systems, but instead they just throw it into higher risk pools and raise prices for everyone to cover the non-payments.

I agree with dungle6, whose comment is now dead. I say screw them and don't pay. Ignore collections for a few years and don't be a wuss about your credit score. Problem solved.

>don't be a wuss about your credit score.

I don't get this statement. Not protecting your credit score can cost you real money. Yeah, the whole thing is a racket, and I frickin' hate it, but, pretending like you can ignore your credit score without impact seems counterproductive.

I would really rather see this whole racket of a medical billing system held to account versus advocating that we allow them to punish us in any way for not playing their fraudulent game.

I agree with your second statement, but I have spent most of my 20s and a great portion of my 30s with crazy negative stuff on my credit report. I flatly refuse to pay outrageous collection fees, and there are at least three items on my credit report which are outright lies. For example, switching from Verizon to T-Mobile, and T-Mobile handed out gift Mastercards to pay the early termination fees for getting out of your Verizon contract. well, Verizon refused to accept my $350 gift Mastercard, so I mailed it to them certified mail. They received it. I have the receipt. But now I have a $400 item on my credit report that I refuse to pay. An administrative mistake the Army made, and now there's another $900 item on my credit report that I refuse to pay because it's a clerical error. That last one's interesting, because I have signed witness statements from a finance guy involved in making the mistake, yet they refuse to clear it, so I refuse to pay it.

Despite this, I have been able to get a car loan, I got a VA loan for a house, I have opened two credit cards (which I use responsibly) since then, and also was able to get a personal loan for an emergency six years ago. It is absolutely possible to do "normal" things. It's just been a matter of explaining the situation.

I hear you, and most of us probably have similar stories to tell. There are really two rackets here: credit reporting agencies and medical billing. Then, they have the audacity to add debt collectors to the mix, who primarily harrass you and threaten to blow up your credit score.

Clearing errors involves a byzantine maze and way too much time in an era when everything is digital. There should be stringent regulation around accuracy and we should all have free year-round, real-time access to our credit scores.

But, my point here is not that you can't live a normal life with a few credit dings. It's that those dings represent punishment that can impact you. For instance, you may not have gotten the best interest rate available on your subsequent credit. So, we should be advocating an end to these fraudulent medical billing practices vs accepting punishment from them, then trying to live with it.

>Verizon

BTW, I predict Verizon will soon be the target of some hefty class-action. They are very shady when it comes to contracts. They also have periods wherein substantial numbers of customers report mysterious, frequently dramatic data overages for a time [0] that suddenly disappear. But, they refuse to acknowledge any issues.

And they specialize in making it extremely difficult to achieve resolution, with multiple phone calls, etc.

[0] https://www.wirelessweek.com/news/2016/09/thousands-verizon-...

This may cause a cascading effect on your credit score. Certain banks tend to trim credit lines or outright close it when collections are reported on credit reports, which in turn increases utilization of credit lines which in turn drops score, which in turn leads to new reviews.

That's bad advice for the HN crowd because as much as they all say they love the valley they all have their eyes on home ownership and GTFOing in about that timeline.

A consultation with the lawyer will be free or low cost. Paying even 200 to save 600 seems like a good idea.

The 'Surprise Medical Billing' protections seem to vary from state to state so you really need to do the research for your particular location.