Hospital says payment plans don’t work since it’s gone to collections…
The hospital is now out of the loop and no longer has any power in this situation.
“gone to collections” means an external company has paid the hospital for the debt. (The hospital likely make cents on the dollar.)
You have to ask for proof of ownership from the debt collectors. Sometimes all they have is your info in a spreadsheet, which is not enough to legally collect. Do some online searches and you should be able to finda lot of resources.
100% this.
Don’t just ignore it because they can sue and if you ignore that then you’ll get a default judgment against you which you actually will have to pay even if the original claim was complete bullshit.
On the other hand, if you demand they provide actual proof of the debt they will usually not have it and will just go away.
A default judgement just reitterates the debt. If they don’t garnish your wages or seize your tax return or put a lein on your property, none of which they can do for most categories of debt, there is no reason to treat a judgement as anything more substantial than another harrassing letter/phone call. I’m not sure it even hits your credit report as new activity.
99% of creditors won’t bother to sue in any court that has jurisdiction over the debtor. They “sue” in “courts” that rubber-stamp all “debts”(for multiple debtors at a time) to no meaningful end, other than they can now say they took you to court and you lost, so now you should totally give them money or they’ll … “sue” again.
ask for proof of ownership from the debt collectors.
I agree with this. If it turns out you really do owe the money and you have a little money offer to settle if they’ll give you something saying the amount settles the debt in full. If they don’t have proof you owe the money, I would ignore them.
Ignore it. It goes away eventually. Don’t answer calls from collectors.
Literally ignore it.
Debt collection part of this aside, you should be challenging all your medical bills when you recieve them. They are inflated from the get go expecting the insurance company fighting the bill but the insurance company isn’t guna bother unless you make it happen. It’s all built into the incredibly fucked up medical billing system and should be done to 100% of medical bills.
