I’m a 22-year-old college student living alone. I had a medical bill for $168.04 that I forgot to pay, and it ended up in collections. I know it was a mistake, and I’ll be more careful in the future. I called today to pay it off and found out it was already paid on September 6, the same date on the letter. I asked my parents, since I’m still on their insurance, but they don’t remember paying it. Is it possible they paid it unintentionally, maybe through another medical bill or something? Could insurance have covered it, or could the hospital have reversed the charge? I missed the payment because it wasn’t charged to my account, and I just forgot to pay it after receiving an email about it.
I’m really grateful it’s taken care of, but I’m confused about how it happened. I’ve never dealt with debt like this before, so any advice would be really helpful!
There are wonderful people in the world, such as RIP Medical Debt, who have eliminated medical debt worth over $8.5 billion, who purchase medical debt and decline to collect on it.
Whoa! That’s incredibly awesome; I had no idea that was a thing. A collections agency purchased my debt; do they purchase debt from them as well?
Indeed. This is what some charity do.
I’m not sure if they purchase directly from debt collectors or from hospitals.
solely directly from the facility, as far as I know. The facility makes cents on the dollar, but its records are immaculate. Additionally, depending on the facility, sending qualified patients to collections is more in accordance with their objective.
That’s also what I was coming here to say. We utilize RIP at my job in medical billing, though I believe they currently go by a different name. However, it is quite advantageous if the facility you used works with them and you meet the requirements.
Here are two important things to know about dealing with medical bills:
First, medical offices often make mistakes. It’s likely that there was a clerical error or your insurance wasn’t applied correctly, leading to the bill being sent to collections by mistake. I’m 45 and this has happened to me three times already.
Second, many medical offices will send bills to collections even though they know your insurance should cover them. This is a kind of scam where they hope you’ll pay out of panic when you see it in collections. The collections agency gets paid, and the doctor ends up receiving more than what the insurance would have covered. This happened to me, and when I contacted my doctor, their office told me to “ignore it” and not worry.
Both of these issues are very common across the country. Don’t hesitate to question a bill or call your insurance company to find out why a claim was denied.
Whoa, that’s terrible! I was aware that something like that was happening in the healthcare system, but I was unaware of it. I appreciate you letting me know, and I will make sure to contact the hospital first to contest in the future. I believe they were already attempting to defraud me because they neglected to bill my hospital account and instead sent me an email requesting payment in advance. I assumed I was in the clear because my account showed $0 in debt. I thought this whole situation was really weird.
It pays to be more knowledgeable about these things, therefore I would presume that it’s a mistake before thinking that it’s a scam.
A dentist attempted to inform my wife that she was not eligible for a crown, which caused us problems. When I called the insurance company, they informed me that we ARE covered for crowns, but they had refused the claim because they needed more information and the exact same claim had been made.
Dentist requested $1000, but insurance only paid $550.
Scam or clerical error? We are never going to know. In any case, we will never again visit that dentist.