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Having wages garnished doesn't sound like fun, but that's just me. Healthcare incident doesn't necessarily mean 100k hospital bill or something ridiculous. It can be as little as 10k (or much less) and still do a lot of financial damage to a person. Sounds like a bad idea.



I knew one person who owed 300K for cancer related surgery and another who owed 30k for appendicitis and they didn't have any legal action issued against them. One was close to minimum wage and one stopped working entirely for years after the surgery. Is this more common in specific states maybe? This was in Florida.


My sister in law has been sued by hospitals twice for unpaid medical debt, but it wasn't even a lot, like ~$1,000 maybe.

Once they have a judgement they can garnish your wages and bank accounts. Other times they may just sell the debt to a debt collector and not even bother trying to collect themselves.


In some states, especially retirement states like Florida, debtors can't take your home.

In other states, they can.


Filing a Homestead Exemption is a good idea when you buy a home for your primary residence.

Rules and amounts vary by state, but it general, it protects you from creditors forcing you to sell your home. They may get some of the proceeds when you do eventually sell, so it may lock you into your location if you get a lien/judgement against you, but it's still better than getting kicked out.

Per usual, IANAL, consult a proper attny in your locale.


I think most of the time you can work with the hospital and possibly get the charge cut in half. Then pay monthly payments with zero interest. Has anyone done this?


I've done it.

I owed a $975 remainder on a $3000 e-room visit. I sent an email asking if they'd discuss a settlement and they just called me and said the debt would be written off completely.

I was going to open the negotiation at $900 because that's what I had left in my HSA account.

So clearly it pays to ask. In my case it probably also helped that I had already paid more than half the bill. But I didn't even have to plead poverty - I just said something along the lines of "I'm trying to figure out how to best deploy the funds I have, would you discuss a settlement"?


Yes people do this all the time, but YMMV. I could be wrong, but I believe the hospital is not obligated to work with you. Depends on who you talk to, the type of procedure it was, your household income and more. You're making $70k/year supporting a family of 4 in a tech-hub like the Bay Area, but say you had an accident vacationing in Texas and now on the hook for $8k in hospital bills. Will the hospital look at your cost of living or will they see 70k and assume you should pay in full?


Getting a $250k bill cut in half doesn't help so much when you used to make $40k/year before you lost your job because of the medical emergency.


One of the hospitals we had a child at had income based repayment and it was a sliding scale all the way up to 100-something thousand dollars per year of income. At the lower end of the scale, they cut your bill to a small fraction of the original bill.

I'm actually surprised this doesn't come up more in discussions about the cost of healthcare.

We were actually uninsured when we had our first child right around the time the ACA came into existence, and my wife had an epidural so it was about as expensive as a birth could be without a C-Section, and after the income based adjustment the bill went from something like $30,000 to only a couple thousand dollars I believe and they also offered a 12 month interest free payment plan.

It was definitely not a side of the industry that I had ever heard about.


In what state can debtees garnish debtor wages? To my knowledge, only the government has that power, and only uses for taxes or child support reasons.


Any creditor can garnish wages by taking you to court. There are state and federal limits to how much they can garnish though.

Here is a law office that deals specifically with this: http://georgettemillerlaw.com/can-hospitals-garnish-my-wages...


Thanks. I’ve never heard of this before. When my parents went through bankruptcy, it never reached that point, I guess.


All of them, but they have to sue first and get a judgement. Anyone with a judgement against you can obtain permission from the court to garnish your wages and bank accounts.




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