Collection agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills last year

[Cinnabar]

Americans’ Medical Debts Are Bigger Than Was Known, Totaling $140 Billion
A new study finds that health care has become the country’s largest source of debt in collections. Those debts are largest where Medicaid wasn’t expanded.

Americans owe nearly twice as much medical debt as was previously known, and the amount owed has become increasingly concentrated in states that do not participate in the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion program.

New research published Tuesday in JAMA finds that collection agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills last year. An earlier study, examining debts in 2016, estimated that Americans held $81 billion in medical debt.

This new paper took a more complete look at which patients have outstanding medical debts, including individuals who do not have credit cards or bank accounts. Using 10 percent of all credit reports from the credit rating agency TransUnion, the paper finds that about 18 percent of Americans hold medical debt that is in collections.

The researchers found that, between 2009 and 2020, unpaid medical bills became the largest source of debt that Americans owe collections agencies. Overall debt, both from medical bills and other sources, declined during that period as the economy recovered from the Great Recession.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/u...-medicaid.html

Yeah USA...nice F'ing model...be proud!

[Cinnabar]

Which party is doing all they possibly can to fix this?

Which other industrialized nation inflicts this upon their citizenry?

[Hawkeye10]

The long dying global economic system crashes into its last breath the week that people stop pretending that debt on the books will be paid back.

[anonymoose]

Which party is doing all they possibly can to fix this?

Which other industrialized nation inflicts this upon their citizenry?

Has nothing to do w/ politics. If medical providers would provide a treatment plan w/ estimated costs along with estimated insurance payments and estimated copay, this would be a substantially smaller problem. Patients could at least then be included in treatment decisions. Many would not consent to treatment and elect the risks of no treatment.
Instead, docs and hospitals implement treatment with no concern as to whether the patient will pay or not, then send a bill for... whatever. It's an incredibly shitty system. Sometimes they just take what the insurance pays, sometimes not.

[Cinnabar]

Has nothing to do w/ politics. If medical providers would provide a treatment plan w/ estimated costs along with estimated insurance payments and estimated copay, this would be a substantially smaller problem. Patients could at least then be included in treatment decisions. Many would not consent to treatment and elect the risks of no treatment.
Instead, docs and hospitals implement treatment with no concern as to whether the patient will pay or not, then send a bill for... whatever. It's an incredibly shitty system. Sometimes they just take what the insurance pays, sometimes not.

Regardelss, the USA's for-profit health insurance industrial complex is a giant grift for the insurance companies and the politicians they have in their pockets.

[Nordberg]

I am sure we can all figure out that thousands and thousands of people spending weeks and sometimes months in the ICU for the Trump virus was expensive. Now they will try and collect. Our great system will bankrupt lots of families.