Ian Howard was shocked to get a $1,000 bill for a brief visit to the emergency room that determined he sprained his ankle in a fall last year. Instead of fighting the bill, he just didn’t pay it.
The rancor against rising healthcare bills is exploding. Millions of Americans are dropping Affordable Care Act plans after the end of subsidies, boosting the rolls of the uninsured. And coinsurance rules routinely require people to shell out even after they have hit their several-thousand-dollar deductibles. Unpaid bills are a real pain point for hospitals. The social-media movement is just one more reason hospitals are having a tough time collecting out-of-pocket payments from patients. “Hospitals would want to make sure patients and the community know they can have conversations with the hospital. A popular subgenre of the social-media posts are new mothers discussing their hefty birth bills. Influencer Lina Huffman posted a TikTok video that starts with the graphic: “PSA: DO NOT PAY THE HOSPITAL BILL UNTIL YOU’VE DONE THIS. Standing in front of a crib with her baby in a sling, she gives tips to new mothers who have gotten bills for hospital deliveries. She advises people to ask for itemized bills, look for errors and duplicated charges that can be corrected.
Patient debt and the cost of charity care rose 16% in the first half of the year, versus the year-ago period, according to Vizient’s KaufmanHall unit. Because costs for insurance premiums are so high, even those with insurance are increasingly opting for high deductibles.
Howard said he posted about his ER bill because “I feel like most people probably relate as far as hospitals trying to upcharge an insane amount,” he said. “As pressure from these trends mounts, hospitals may need to redesign their financial and operational strategies,” the report said. “Any kind of negative perception is always concerning,” said Rick Gundling, a senior vice president with the Healthcare Finance Management Association, a professional organization for healthcare provider finance officials. “They make it so complicated to confuse you but you’re going to be smarter than them,” Huffman says.
“I went in for a sprained ankle. “Y’all ain’t never seeing that money! “I wanted to share practical ways to reduce or negotiate medical bills for other moms. Even personal-finance influencers with big followings are getting in on the game. She began to get messages from her followers asking for tips on dealing with high medical bills. So she hired some billing experts to learn how patients could save and began posting tips. Her top tips include: When you get a bill, don’t pay until you ask the hospital for an itemized bill. Scan it for mistakes and duplicate charges and ask the hospital to remove incorrect charges. Get an explanation of benefits from your insurer and make sure they are paying for what they are supposed to cover. And ask the hospital whether you are eligible for a financial-assistance program. Kullberg uses props and costumes and plays all the roles in her videos. In one, she holds up a finger covered in red marker to look like blood, pretending to be a patient who asks how much stitches will cost, and is later shocked by the bill. Write to Peter Loftus at [email protected]
All’s they did was look at it and say, the bitch is sprained” the 28-year-old yells in a rant on TikTok. The 24-second video has racked up more than three million views on TikTok and more than 8,000 comments, including stories about other hefty bills that have gone unpaid. It only took me 10 minutes to do it. That is $400 of free money I can now spend on my morning coffee. The video got about 274,000 views, and others she has posted on the topic have gotten more than one million. Medical debt below $500 no longer affects credit scores under voluntary policies adopted by major credit-report agencies, and some states have enacted laws seeking to ban or restrict medical debt affecting credit scores. Lauren Meadows, whose videos about motherhood have earned her 256,000 followers on TikTok, has posted several about medical debt she incurred from baby deliveries and hospital stays. She called the collection agency, which told her she could get a 25% discount to satisfy the debt. Erika Kullberg, a 36-year-old lawyer in New York, gained a big social-media following about five years ago when she began posting tips on TikTok about how to get a replacement for damaged Nikes or how to get paid by airlines for lost luggage.
Because i did this for my first baby, and this is my second, and I just got my $1,500 bill to $1,100, she also tells people to ask the hospital for discounts, including for paying in full over the phone: “I know this. One follower told her that she was able to cut her hospital bills by nearly 50% as a result of what Kullberg had shared.
Huffman said some people responded to her video saying they simply don’t pay medical bills. “While I understand feeling overwhelmed by the cost, I believe it’s better to address medical debt than ignore it,” she said. In one, she said the hospital sent her bill to a debt collector five months after the birth. “I guess the moral of the story is let your medical bills go to a debt collector, ‘cause then they’ll cut it down,” she says. In another video from last year, she cries when she discovers that $9,000 had been cut from her balance, so that she “only” owed $6,700. “Oh my gosh, this is such a relief,” she says. Andrew Gordon, who writes for the Marshall Allen Project newsletter, which offers tips on how people can reduce their healthcare expenses, said the social-media trend reflected the pent-up frustration with the existing system. “It’s a desire to want to figure out and use the collective knowledge of the public to figure out how they can fight back,” he said. She said she recently ordered a nurse’s outfit for a future post.
