Need Help with Medical Lawsuit against me

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Depending on who you owe how much to, it's possible no one will try to sue you. Again, they have to weigh the cost of the lawsuit and resulting trial to what you owe them.

They cannot go after the money your family gives you to live on, as far as I know.
They definitely cannot take assets away from you that provide you with shelter, food, etc.
But I am not a lawyer. I work in a hospital and what I have written above is what I do know from that and from family being in similar situations.

As far as making payments... I can't see how any hospital would decline getting payments since they lose so much money from nonpayment anyway. Any money they can recover is good.

At our hospital, we give generous discounts of someone pays their bill either in cash(checks same thing) and/or pays before 30 days are over.

Many hospitals are getting somewhat creative in order to get as much money back on their services as possible.
It's not just the patients who are not paying... it's the government also.
Medicare does not always reimburse a hospital or doctor for their full costs associated with patient treatment.

If you can offer payments, then I'm sure they will go for it.
After a time of making payments, you can contact the billing office again and ask if they would accept a lower amount of money if you could pay the remaining balance off right away.

Example... you owe $2,000.00 and make payments for a year averaging $25/month.
After a year you still owe $1,700.00.
You come up with enough money to total, maybe $1,200.00.
Call up the billing department and see if they will take that $1,200 and write off the remaining $500.

Part of the reason this works is because the hospital would like to have as much cash now as opposed to a tiny bit trickling in over several years.

The whole thing about notices saying you MUST PAY IN FULL is to pressure you into paying.
They can, and do, tack on more to the bill in interest and associated costs for collection, but you have the option to make payments.

Again, if a collection agency gets involved, some of those people try really hard to scare you.
They will go as far as they can threatening you, but they cannot do anything more than request you pay the bill... submit a report to credit agencies, and possibly file a lien or suit to recover the money.

Take a look at your bill(s).
Who do you actually owe money to?
Is it all to the hospital?
Are there bills from other businesses associated with the E.R. Physician or the Radiology Department, or the Laboratory?

If this $2,000.00 is actually split between different people as mentioned above, then I think it is unlikely you would be sued for recovery because the amount they are seeking would be less than what they will incur with legal fees and all.

Again... I am not a lawyer, this is just my experience only.

The best thing is to make contact with a specific person in the billing department and whenever possible, continue to speak only to them. They will get familiar with you and hopefully this will create a situation where they may be a bit more friendly towards you.
Even people in the billing department have feelings and a heart!
But they still have to do whatever they can to help recover the hospital's money or it will hit some hard times.

Anyway, hope you can make some positive headway on all this.

Good luck
Take care and may you fare well!

Thanks for all your helpful advice. I did try to find some contact information on the billing department, but to no help, I only get a phone number. This isn't good. I need an email contact. I have a problem with phone calls like this because I cannot carry on complex conversations on the phone. I cannot retain the information. I also get angry. Most the time, I start just hang up on them or I scream at them if they don't understand me. That never helps. If I have a good day, i can sometimes get by if I have a helpful person. most operators on the phone speak about 5 x faster than a normal person, and I sometimes cannot even understand what theya re saying. I really do need to contact a person via email. It is the only thing I can handle that is timely.

I cannot find a single email addy on the entire hospital site. I don't know why that is. I know the Hosptial has email. But doesn't list a single one anywhere on the site. It only gives phone numbers.

I did contact the disability assistance department at the local courthouse, I am hoping someone there can help me.

Thanks again for all your helpful info. I do appreciate it.

Idaho Aspie

Write a short note asking for an email address then? Mail that and you should get an answer back fairly soon shouldn't you?

The other option is to google the hospital.
I can find ours on google and it's just a 49 bed hospital, although it's owned by the Sisters of Orange... a large Catholic-based hospital chain.

I'm sure if you called during business hours and just asked the operator for the email address, someone could give that to you.
All you would have to say is that you are trying to send something via email.
The other option would be fax, although I don't know if you have access to a fax machine.

As for the letter, maybe you could write this...

I am in need of your email address so I may contact you regarding my bill.
Please send it to my email address - [email protected]
Thank you

Short, to the point and clear about what you need.

I will try that. Thanks.

Idaho Aspie

wsmac is one of my hero's

wsmac - thanks for posting all of that. i was getting tired of all the 'AS isn't an excuse' posts, because that doesn't help with IdahoAspie's problem -now-.
i know i need a lot of things spelled out for me. and i doubt IdahoAspie really researched this sort of thing until [s]he had food poisoning... at which point no research is going to happen.
it's nice to see some people who are more bent on 'here is all of the information you need to solve this problem and prevent this from happening again - now use it.'
see also: 'give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. teach a man to fish, and he can eat for life' [or until he uses up the pond's resources, whichever comes first )
i'm lucky that i can call my parents or boyfriend with these things and they can walk me through it. can't fathom not having anyone to turn to.

You need to file countersuit against the hospital and also initiate a lawsuit against the hospital.

the hospital should have provided someone able to explain this stuff. and they FAILED... you have the right to legal representation and if i were the judge i would be giving you up to and not limited to 300,000 dollars in damages. 100,000 for health damages and suffering 100,000 for being forced into a lawsuit that was unjust 100,000 for all other damages... this is pure f*cking BS on the restaurant and hospital

Give them hell I say!! Dont let them win!

i remember a few years ago, i was throwing some chemical melt on the snow at my old house so my mom could get to her car and i couldnt get the lid open and i opend it akwardly and it got all in my face. then when i went to the hospital i sat there for like 45 minutes and they didnt even do anything exept make me sit on a bed, after that since im a patience snob i just got fed up with it and left without any treatment and they billed me for over $700 just for that. i was in shock and couldnt believe it. i never paid it because i thought it was unreasonably unfair

Point one - If you walk in (or are carried into) a medical establishment, such as a hospital emergency room, and are registered as a patient there, they can bill you for your time if you've gone into a treatment room. The bill is valid, and most courts will uphold it.

If you find yourself in this sort of situation - you're billed for treatment you asked for and you think it's too expensive - you don't have a lot of options, really. You can contact the hospital in writing and dispute the bill right away. (Use certified mail so you can prove you've done so.) They should provide you with a detailed breakdown of the charges. If something is on that list and it wasn't done for you, you can dispute it.

If the bill is a valid bill - that is, you did receive the treatment - you might try notifying the hospital that you cannot pay it and that you are contacting social services for assistance. That might buy you some time. Any contact you have with the hospital should be in writing - use the mail, and send everything certified so you can prove that you sent it. If you're low income, definitely check with your local social services agencies to see if they can help you. The hospital may negotiate with you, drop some of the charges, reduce others. Or they may not. It's completely up to them.

Point two - Don't just ignore it and hope it will go away. If you walk away from a bill without dealing with it, you're just asking for trouble - a dinged up credit report, the bill being turned over to collectors, garnishment of your wages, etc.. Bill collectors do not give a damn about your level of intellectual or social functioning. All they care about is getting their money. They'll sell your debt to other collectors, and these things can follow you for years and years. There's really not a lot they can actually do to you, but they will annoy you by phoning and coming by asking for the money.

However, that being said, in most states (I believe most have some sort of law to this effect) if the people you owe the money to contact you about a valid bill you can tell them that you are aware of the bill and request that they stop contacting you. The procedures on that vary - you may have to do it in writing. You'll end up in court with them seeking a judgment against you. They'll probably get it, as you did use the services so you do owe the money. They will probably then turn your file over to a collection agency.

Next time you are feeling really sick, you might want to try an urgent care center rather than going to a hospital emergency room. Emergency Rooms are just about the most expensive options there are.

Point three - If you are over 18 and do not have some sort of legal paperwork in place that says you are not responsible for your actions, then you are responsible for your actions. Period. Don't do anything, don't sign anything, that you don't understand. Ever. Ask a friend who might understand a bit better to go with you or help you out. Perhaps a relative?


Health care in the USA is still considered a commodity, something you can buy if you want it, not a right. As such, you're pretty much in the same situation as someone who buys a car or a house or something - a consumer. And the medical folks are the vendors.

I do have the utmost sympathy for your situation. My daughter, who was 20 at the time, collapsed one day at a local shopping mall. We got her to the emergency room, where she sat on a stretcher all day while they checked every now and then to see if she was alright while waiting for a bed to become available in the hospital itself. After a 12 hour wait, she was moved into a hospital room where she basically watched tv for the next 24 hours, on and off. They did, on the next day, a number of tests. The bill for the two day stint was roughly $17,000. Thankfully, we are members of a HMO and our cost was $50. The insurance picked up the rest. I was amazed at the bill, and did request a detailed breakdown of it just to see what costs were, and found things like one antibiotic pill being charged at $28, etc. It was all completely legal - they can charge whatever they want. I knew it was going to be expensive, but I was completely staggered at the total. My daughter would have had absolutely no clue, and she's very high functioning. If she would not have been covered by my insurance, she'd have owed the hospital $17,000.

Best of luck to you. Do you not have a family member who can help you with this? It's time to ask them for help, if you do.

I was in the hospital for 4 days... 65,000 dollars... healthcare in the united states is bullsh*t

Hospitals are unbelievably expensive. I don't know how much the total cost of my stay was when I had a ruptured appendix as a kid (probably astronomical since it was almost a month), but I know it cost $500 a day just to have a *bed* in the hospital- not including food, tests, medical care, etc. Just to be in the hospital it was five hundred dollars a day. Over the course of 24 days, that's $12000. Luckily my mom has good insurance.

Whenever I don't understand something, I always call my parents and ask for help. They help me get through things I don't understand.

I really hate it when I get taken advantage of, especially when I think I understood something. But I have parents who can help.

Just to clarify some things...

There are many variables that dictate the cost of medical care in the U.S.
It's not just hospitals deciding to charge lots of money.
Here's a few of the factors...

Insurance - to run the hospital
Accreditation - to be able to stay open through certification
Property/Building costs
Equipment costs - purchasing/owning equipement with the subsequent service contracts needed due to the complexity of the machines, leasing machines due to the purchase cost being too much to justify buying it, leasing equipment in order to keep working because the machine they own is down for repairs, etc.
Utility costs
Personnel costs(wages, insurances, holiday/sick leave pay, on-the-job injuries, union contracts, etc) - from the Administration on down. Contracts with Radiology groups, Emergency Department Physician groups, traveling nurses because of a local nursing shortage...
Records storage
Maintenance
Lost reimbursements relating to non-paying patients, unreliable medicare disbursments (which typically pay lower than what the actual charges were)

And there are others.

It's easy to make the hospitals look like the big bad boys on the block, but it's really not that they just decide to charge whatever they want.
There are guidelines, state and federal guidelines, etc.
Like any business (it is a business... money goes in and out....), there are some examples of spurious spending.
But by and large... the hospitals and EMS services I have worked for are in the business of helping people... not gouging them for whatever they can get out of them money wise.

Don't like medicine in the U.S.?
Follow Micheal I just want attention Moore around the globe, but unlike Mr. Moore, take a truthful look at medical care elsewhere....

Canada... talk to enough Canadians and you will find their own horror stories about their system
England... same thing as Canada... long waits (I'm not talking 3 hrs), for procedures, a maze of hassles to get what you need...

I'm not aware of one medical system in the world that doesn't have it's share of problems.
Can anyone name one?
I'd like to check it out!

While people groan about the cost of a pill or a shot, what they do not understand is what is behind the cost.

Where I work, for example.. the lab... you want an HIV test because you had sex with someone and now you're worried?
It's just one little test... right?

Well...
Someone has to pay the admissions clerk to put your information into the computers(which had to be purchased, software bought, IT personnel hired to maintain the system...) so that a record is created that will help identify you not only for the billing department, but for any department you receive treatment from.
We need to know that Samantha Smith is the correct Samantha Smith before we take blood, run the test and report the results.
You do think that's important don't you?
Well, it may be that in your area there are 6 Samantha Smiths and 5 of those have been patients at the same hospital you are at now.

You get the picture.....

So now you're down in our laboratory... I do get paid, the hospital provides me with a lab coat (and every other lab person, and these are properly laundered because of the possible contaminants they may be exposed to which would not be good to toss into the home laundry with the family's wash).
I have certain benefits the hospital pays for.
The hospital has insurance (and no doubt a legal team on call) to cover any legal issues arising out of my performance at work.ETA- The legal team covers the hospital in total... I'm not THAT bad that they need a legal team just for moi!
My area of the lab has all the equipment necessary to make the venipuncture, collect the blood, and patch up the patient.
We also have computers (see computers above in the admissions paragraph), copier and printers (which are serviced by outside contract because that's cheaper than an inhouse service department for the many other machines like these).
When I take the vial of blood over to the processing section of my lab I place it in a centrifuge(specific type for that particular job), then it goes back to the techs (ooh... more employees! ka ching! ) who run the sample through enormous lab machinery (which we recently purchased to replace the old, slower, broken down machines that we struggled to keep going as long as we could) (also these machines require calibration which uses special items that need to be replenished - purchased on a regular basis)

OH NO... WAIT... we can't run the HIV test in our little lab... can't afford the machine/reagent/calibration/etc. to do the few we get.... just wouldn't pay for itself in a million years (well, that might be a slight exaggeration ).
SO, we pay a courier service to take it to another, larger lab, that receives the same test from many other smaller labs, bundles them all together and runs the tests on their big expensive machinery.
Oh and we have to package up that plastic tube of serum in a very special way... guidelines, laws, etc.

Hey... I'm getting tired of all this typing... figure you get the idea now? Just one little test that we don't always get paid for or at least not always the asking price.

Multiply that by the thousands of tests we do every month, the procedures done all over the hospital, etc.

I wish it could be different also.
And I do see where even our little hospital wastes money on little things sometimes which would be good not to do.
But I can say with confidence (right or wrong ) that our little 49 bed hospital is not out to gouge patients, family, or insurance for every penny we can get.

In fact, we sit on a very fine line between black and red, with the threat of cuts in services to the community and every-so-often, threats of closure. Guess how many hospitals in America are in the same position?
Offer up a suggestion of how many medical systems around the world either struggle to work because of the particular system they run under, or how many governments struggle to find funding to keep all that socialized medicine going to the right people when they need it!

I'm glad there are folks who look over their hospital bills and ask questions of employees like me... pssst those hospital places are full of... PEOPLE!... who actually make HUMAN ERRORS! .. don't tell anyone I told you.... everyone thinks we're perfect... or at least thinks we SHOULD BE!

It also depends on the hospital being nonprofit or for profit. Of course it's never as simple as it seems. And they do have to recover their costs, both varieties. It's a business. It's not a public service. And the "for profit" places can and do charge what they want to charge. Sorry, but when the admin/doctor's lot is full of beemers, jags, and porsches, I'm not inclined to go with the "long-suffering altruistic professional" schpiel. I do know there are a lot of very dedicated healthcare pros out there. There are also people in it for a dollar. I believe we ended up in a hospital designed for the latter.

Yes, I know what they're doing. They're pumping up the charges that they bill to the insurance, because the insurance companies will pay them and the hospital is trying to stay in business and make their profit. They are a business. They are not a public service. And my insurance premiums through my employer have tripled in the time I've worked here, to compensate (because the insurance company is also a for-profit business). And a lot that used to be covered has been dropped, in order to make the plan affordable at all.

I do know that the $28 Cipro antibiotic pill was funding at least a few antibiotics for people who cannot pay their bills, or do not, or who are on government programs that reimburse for less than the pharm companies charge for the pill itself when it's sold to the clinics.

Actually, in this country, we have it pretty good IF we have decent private insurance. The catch is, there are a huge number of people who do not. That is where we lag so far behind a number of other countries. Yes, it can take months for an appointment in Canada or England. It can take months here, as well, even on private insurance (I have to book our physicals six to eight months in advance, and my daughter's ongoing specialized care needs have to be booked months in advance.) I'm guessing that for more urgent care needs it's comparable for those on public programs here to what it is in those other countries, if they get seen at all.

I remember when my daughter was an infant, she was very sick so very often. We were lucky to be in California, where there was a pretty decent medicaid program (as they went) that would cover her. (Medicaid is the state-funded program in the USA for low-income people, and each state administers it differently.) I phoned, one day, every single doctor in the yellow pages to see if my daughter could be seen. This was in a city of over 2 million people. That was a lot of doctors. Not one would take a new medicaid patient. (Yes, I know the argument and reasoning behind their decision - I wouldn't have either, or I'd have gone out of business. At that time medicaid would reimburse $14 for an office visit they usually billed out at $40.) In that particular episode we eventually ended up at a charity clinic run by a catholic hospital - my kid had a screaming ear infection, with pus dripping out, for six weeks before we got a slot at that clinic. There were that many people in as bad or worse shape in front of us. We only got "priority" because she was an infant.

The alternative was the emergency room - which we used from time to time when it was really bad. Catch there was that they would only give us a prescription for a minimal treatment, and we'd end up back there again when it ran out and the infection came back. And a trip to the ER could take up to 20 hours. Most employers do not look kindly on repeated absences due to your sitting in the ER with a sick kid.

When we lived in Texas, she could be seen under the medicaid program as well. Before I had her, when I was a single adult, but poor, I could not. If I got sick, too bad. There was no care. My daughter, in about a year, will no longer be eligible for my insurance. There is no program to cover her. She has serious health issues, life-threatening at times. But there is no program. We'll be back to "out of pocket" payment for any care she gets, unless she can manage to score a job with health insurance. The next time she collapses at the mall, or anywhere, it'll be ugly if some well-meaning soul calls an ambulance and they cart her off to the hospital. Very, very ugly. Unless she's found a job that pays well and has insurance attached.

Yes, the medical system in this country is not a public service. It's a commodity. That's the problem. As long as it's a "bought and sold", those folks who can afford the best get the best. Those who have good insurance will subsidize those with poor insurance or no insurance.

I also know that people die here needlessly, due to lack of medical care. In one of the richest countries in the world. People are having gastric bypass surgery because they can't stop stuffing their faces. They're having face lifts and ass lifts because they don't like looking old or droopy... and kids die because there's no resources for another dialysis station. What's wrong with this picture? A lot, in my eyes.

Nope, I can't tell you how to fix it. I'm not a logistics/finance person. I suspect what would happen is that even the most feasible program would cost a ton (people would have to pay more taxes, which will be unpopular). The folks used to getting top-notch care wouldn't get it as resources were funneled to lower-level folks (and the upscale folks will howl). And, eventually, due to supply-and-demand, there will evolve a system of private clinics that cater specifically to the elite folks who can pay top dollar to be taken care of. Much like I see going on in England.

Which puts us back to square one, doesn't it? I hope someone figures it out or, at least, makes it a priority. People are dieing over this.


And now we're WAY, WAY off the original topic.

Last edited by Nan on 13 Feb 2008, 3:03 pm, edited 4 times in total.

sue the restaurant...