Posted on 09/09/2019 11:30:49 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
Heather Waldron and John Hawley are losing their four-bedroom house in the hills above Blacksburg, Va. A teenage daughter, one of their five children, sold her clothes for spending money. They worried about paying the electric bill. Financial disaster, they say, contributed to their divorce, finalized in April.
Their money problems began when the University of Virginia Health System pursued the couple with a lawsuit and a lien on their home to recoup $164,000 in charges for Waldron’s emergency surgery in 2017.
The family has lots of company: Over six years ending in June 2018, the health system and its doctors sued former patients more than 36,000 times for over $106 million, seizing wages and bank accounts, putting liens on property and homes and forcing families into bankruptcy, a Kaiser Health News analysis has found.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
My mom lives in a small town that is served by a very small hospital with limited services that’s about 60 miles from the Mayo Clinic.
She is routinely referred to the Mayo.
She’s had no problems - then again she has insurance.
Next time tell them you prefer sheep. ;-)
I guess the thing to do is create a corporation or LLC, come up with some form of earning money through it, and then make it the owner of your property. That way, if you are sued, the property is untouchable, IIRC.
No insurance? I thought it was mandatory in ‘17 and policies I am familiar with from Bronze to Gold have an out of pocket maximum of around $10K per individual.
What did they do?
They did. It is a myth that you can negotiate a cheaper rate for cash. If you have or know someone who has it was an exception.
I had health insurance my entire life until 1/1/2014 - the day Obamacare kicked in. I’ve saved tens of thousands in insurance premiums. I’m almost 66. My wife is a few days younger than me.
We’ve had two miraculous healings. The lord is the great healer. We put our faith in him and he’s more than proven himself.
I needed radiation treatment and I was out of work and out of insurance. The hospital said no problem we will give you “charity care” to cover it. I went through procedure and months later I got the bill for a little less than $20,000. They said sorry but there was no money available so they in essence have said FU pay us. I now get threatening letters etc. etc.
Whether or not medical bills went to your credit history varied by state.
According to the article Virginia passed something in 1988 which assured that they would.
When I lived in Michigan the state law was that medical providers could NOT report you to credit bureaus. Everybody knew this and thus they all paid $1 per month towards outstanding medical bills.
I think providers recouped that by massively overcharging those on UAW insurance. But since that is nearly gone I have no idea what they are doing now.
My dad worked for a small manufacturing firm that did this. The owner created a holding company that owned all of the buildings. Then his manufacturing company leased them back.
If anyone sued the manufacturing firm he still held on to the real estate.
Plus he could monkey with his own rent to create tax losses when that played to his advantage.
Thanks for that link. Very interesting.
This article does not give the full story. It appears these people were uninsured and are not destitute. They are screwed. It is scary for all of us, it is sad. The problem is a health care system out of control for profit with too many non-paying people. So they make a profit by charging through the nose every time they get a chance. “Charity” hospitals and state hospitals don’t pay their administrators millions without charging a lot ever time they get even the slightest chance.
It was much better when hospitals were run by charities and not for profit in the pre-Nixon days.
Even my hired hand has health insurance and it is a silver plan, better than mine with lower deductibles and lower out of pocket maximums. It is the required minimum plan for those who get subsidized insurance. I don’t think it costs him and his wife $60 a month after the subsidy. Maybe $90 tops.
Nobody is going to like this but there is no excuse for not having insurance if you make less than $60K a year with obamacare insurance available. It is people that make $60,000.01 and have to pay the full fare that take get screwed. I pay $22,000 a year for bronze plan (more like pot metal) insurance not half as good as the silver plan that costs maybe $800 a year. Why do I have this plan that makes me spend $22,000 a year plus the $7,500 deductible before it pays a penny? Because if something bad happens I don’t want to have to go bankrupt because of medical bills.
Be prepared is all I can say. It is expensive and makes me cringe to pay this much for something I can only use in a disaster when I once got really good insurance back in 2013 for about $6,000 a year. We were younger then but not much younger. Obamacare blew the lid off of insurance rates and the threshold cost to receive any coverage.
Obamacare run amok?...................
Absolutely. Remember, obamacare has combined Medicare, Medicaid, insurance, and NOW private pay patients into one computer system, along with all pharmacies. It’s big brother on steroids, and it knows EVERYTHING about you. Repealing it probably would NOT erase any of this. Not that most politicians WANT to repeal it. Even conservatives are talking about government health care plans. Funny how none of them are talking about doing away with universal health care anymore.
I really hate living in such a litigious culture.
And 5x more than Medicare pays.
I believe one of top, if not the number 1 cause of BK in the US, is medical bills...
That’s been constant for decades.
Why did they not have insurance as required by Obamacare’s insurance mandate?
But this is a gov’t run system. The State of Virginia controls it.
The article, of course, does not tell us this.
Without reading the article, Im guessing they did not have insurance and rolled the dice; lost
We used this service, https://www.newchoicehealth.com/ to find the lowest cost hernia surgery for my husband.
It cost us 3500 at a surgery center outside of Seattle. Even with travel costs it was 1/3 the 12-15,000 quoted by the 3 local hospitals.
I was very pleased by the entire process and transaction. The surgery center was very upscale, clean and modern.
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