What Do You Do When You Can’t Pay That Doctor Bill?

Getting hit with a big doctor bill can come as a nasty shock, particularly if a health issue is keeping you from bringing home a paycheck. When funds are tight and you’re struggling to keep up with your mortgage payments or buy groceries, throwing one more expense onto the pile can throw your finances completely off track.

One option is to just ignore medical debt and hope it goes away, but that only makes the situation worse if it gets handed off to a collection agency. At that point, your credit score starts to suffer and debt collectors can take you to court to recover the balance. If medical bills are causing you stress, here’s what you can do to ease some of the financial pressure:

 1. Go over the Bill with a Fine-Tooth Comb

Accepting a medical bill at face value can potentially be an expensive mistake. According to Medical Billing Advocates of America, as many as 80 percent of medical bills contain at least one inaccuracy. If you’re not taking the time to go over it line by line, you could be missing out on duplicate charges or other errors that can make the cost higher than it needs to be.

Every time you get a new bill or an explanation of benefits from your insurance company, you should review it carefully to see what you’re being charged for. If you spot something that doesn’t add up, don’t hesitate to contact the health care provider to double-check the bill’s accuracy. Even if it’s something small, it’s still worth it to get any unnecessary charges removed or corrected.

2. Double-Check Your Coverage

If you’ve looked over your medical bills and you can’t find any errors, the next step is to make sure that you’re not being charged for something that’s covered by your insurance company. This is especially important if you have more than one insurance plan.

For instance, some employers may use one insurance company for emergency care and another for doctor’s visits. If you go to the emergency room or undergo surgery, the hospital and the doctor would need to bill their services separately. If they send their claims to the wrong insurer, the bill could rebound back on you. It may only take a quick phone call to sort things out.

3. Test out Your Haggling Skills

Negotiating your medical bills down is like negotiating anything else–you have to know what your bottom line is and you can’t take no for an answer. Depending on your situation, you may be able to get some of the charges reduced or dropped altogether, either on the doctor’s end or the insurance company’s.

The key to haggling successfully is to make sure you’re talking to the right person. At the doctor’s office or hospital, that would be the person who’s in charge of medical billing. With the insurance company, you’d want to talk to whomever is handling your claim. If you’re met with resistance on either front, don’t hesitate to ask to speak to a supervisor. The more persistent you are, the more likely your efforts are to pay off.

4. Ask for More Time to Pay

Unpaid medical bills are a major source of lost revenue for doctors, hospitals and other health care providers and the last thing they want is for you to skip out on paying. In most cases, it’s possible to work out a payment plan when you’re having a rough time financially that can keep you off the radar of a debt collector.

If you only owe a few hundred dollars, the doctor may just take your word for it that you’re in a financial jam and agree to let you pay $10 or $20 a month towards the balance. If you’re staring down several thousand dollars in charges, however, you may have to prove that your hardship is genuine to qualify for a payment plan.

5. Look into Financial Assistance

If you’ve never had trouble with medical bills before, you may not know that financial help is available from a number of different sources. The Medicaid program, for example, will pay some or all of your health care costs if you qualify. You have to pass an eligibility test that’s based on your income, assets and family size and the limits vary from state to state.

Aside from government assistance, many hospitals also offer their own in-house charity care programs. Again, your income and assets factor in to whether or not you qualify but if you’re approved, you may be able to get your medical debt wiped out. These programs cover people who are uninsured, underinsured or otherwise wouldn’t be able to get Medicaid.

6. Don’t Let Medical Debt Ruin Your Credit

Medical debt typically isn’t reported on your credit history until it gets sold to a collection agency. This is the one thing you want to avoid when you can’t pay. Once a collection account shows up your credit, your score will start to lose points left and right if you’re not making any payments on what you owe. Facing a huge medical bill when you’re flat broke can feel like the end of the world, but it doesn’t have to be if you know how to handle it.