Re:How a Medical Catastrophe Can Bankrupt a Life
by uberduber on Friday February 02, 2018 @11:15PM
(#16296133)
There are businesses that are medical bill negotiators and charge you a percentage of the bill.
In general, they only negotiate hospital bills because they are the only bills large enough. I would say that the typical final negotiated rate they get from the hospital is about 3-20% of the billed amount. It depends on how high the original bill is, and it also depends on whether you need to make payments and how long the series of payments is.
Hospitals will certainly claim that you need to send in the proof of assets, usually you have to refuse about 6 or 7 times and they will relent.
However, things have changed in the last few years and professional medical bill negotiators have told me certain hospitals are completely unreasonable and refuse to negotiate. They advise these people to file bankruptcy.
I've known people to successfully negotiate to 40-50% of original bill, usually with proof of (lack of) assets.
Maybe if you really are basically broke, they'll write you off rather than carry it on their books until they sell the debt. On the other hand if your bill is 45,000 and you have even meager assets : say a couple of cars and equity in a house, I'm guessing their going to try hard to see a good chunk of that.