My ex had collectors calling her several times a day for months while she was disputing a bill. It probably depends on whether the hospital writes the bill off or sells it to
collectors.
I feel for your ex, I have three (3) in office visits covered by my insurance that are overdue as of August. I’ve had to go back and forth on the phone in a Kafka-hell to get my insurance to cover a covered visit because of some opaque clerical error (and I write medical insurance review software and I’m still confused as to who is to blame…). Insurance issued a payment last month finally, but the doctor has yet to recognize it so I still get reminders on being “late” for a bill I don’t ultimately owe.
I cannot imagine how infuriated I would be if I were being punished on my credit for someone else’s clerical error.
"I’ve had to go back and forth on the phone in a Kafka-hell to get my insurance to cover a covered visit because of some opaque clerical error"
the same happened to my ex. Something had gone wrong between hospital and insurance and both refused to fix it. Which left her in between trying to figure this out while trying to recover. It's really infuriating that they can treat people that way. Once you experience this together with billing for things that never happened and insurance refusing things they have to cover, you can only conclude that insurances and hospitals are basically fraudsters that for some reason are allowed to get away with it.
But I guess that’s my whole point is once they sell it to collectors it’s equivalent to the bill not existing? My confusion is around wondering if I’ve somehow fallen through the cracks and got lucky or other people have the same experience.
Why do other people pay bills they receive in the mail?
That's not always the case. Some hospitals will still keep a record of the unpaid bill on your account even after they pass the debt to a collector, and the collector will report whether you pay to the hospital.
The practice and billing parts of the system are usually mostly separate, so the person checking you in for your appointments may not know or have any way to see that you have unpaid bills and you won't necessarily be denied care for it, but there's no real standard here either.
