The medical bills are piling up in the mail box. You can’t afford to pay them even with health insurance. Let alone without any insurance at all. So now you are considering bankruptcy as the only way out. Filing bankruptcy in the long run wont really solve the problem. What if you get sick again, and the bills start piling up again? You can always file again in 7 years but you may end up with two bankruptcies on your credit report. What is the solution to this stressful problem?
You can get someone else to pay for them. Especially if you are unemployed, and have large amounts of medical debt. Apply for the medicaid program through your state government. Whether you are a man or a woman you may qualify for aid. Although women, & pregnant women usually have a somewhat higher approval rate. You may even qualify if you have a mental disability like depression. Submit all of your bills along with the application. (more…)
A recent study shows that 62.1% of personal bankruptcy cases in 2007 were linked to medical expenses. Given our countries financial crisis it’s safe to say that this is an even bigger problem today in 2009. In this study released by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren it showed that most medical debtors were middle class families that owned homes, were employed, and 75% had health insurance.
So what does this study reveal about our current health care situation? One serious illness can cause unaffordable medical expenses or a decrease in or lack of income which results in bankruptcy. Most families have nothing to fall back on if they become ill and lose their job, which consequently causes the loss of health insurance.
Most all bankruptcy debtors had some medical debt, but about half of the debtors, according to the study had mostly medical debt. While this study only encompasses a handful of bankruptcies, 2,314 to be exact, it does make sense. In 2005 laws were passed to make bankruptcy a bit harder to obtain, yet the numbers increased after a few years. (more…)
When folks ponder bankruptcy, they as a rule imagine cars, houses, or credit cards. They more often than not will not consider medical bills. But the reality is that a big part of the bankruptcies filed in the United States are thanks to overwhelming medical expenses that people cannot pay.
If you are somebody who is considering medical bankruptcy, here are a few things that will give details to you the two kinds of bankruptcy and the ways they surely will affect your costs and the different ways they are going to affect you in the the near future.
Chapter 7
This sort of bankruptcy will wholly exonerate most of the debts that somebody has, which will likely include all of the person’s medical costs. The unpleasant thing about this type of bankruptcy is that it will remain on a person’s credit report for a decade, which is a exceptionally long time. This will also really affect their credit, even if that person filed it only because of their medical costs.
Chapter 13 (more…)
Thanks to the decline of the economy, a lot of people are finding that they have a stack of past due medical bills. The stack gets larger and larger every month, and they don’t know how they are going to manage to pay them.
Here are some steps that you can take to deal with unpaid medical bills.
Look at Your Budget
The first thing that you want to do is take a look at your budget. If you don’t have one yet, make one up. List all your expenses and your income for each month to figure out where your money is going.
Get the Bottom Line
Go through your past due medical bills and make a list of what you owe. If you don’t have your latest copy, call the number that is on one of your older bills and find out what your current total is. (more…)
While it is true that most of the foreclosures happening in the United States were caused by substandard mortgages, and/or the fact that many people have lost their jobs and can no longer make payments, there is also another reason for the foreclosure rate. Many people have filed for bankruptcy due to medical bills piling up.
This happens when the insurance company does not pay for the cost of care which has been rendered, and the patient simply can’t pay the bill and has no choice but to file for bankruptcy, and in doing so they often end up losing their home along with all their other financial problems. (more…)
Medical debt happens to be a dominant bankruptcy cause across the globe and primarily in the United States. Most often when people are not able to get rid of their unpaid medical debt they make the serious mistake of declaring insolvency. So let’s go over a few important points on how to avoid hospital debt.
Another typical mistake that most people make in regards to their hospital debt is to transfer it on their credit cards. Transferring medical debt on your credit card isn’t even a solution, forget about being a good one. You would be aware that the interest rate of credit cards is in general higher as compared to your medical agency. Plus, shifting the bill to your credit card worsens your possibilities of a Medicaid refund.
If you have serious unpaid debt on your head, you need to be all the more prompt to clear as much payment as you can and as quickly as you can. Being proactive in paying your debt is always advisable. (more…)
Filing for insolvency is undeniably not the right possible choice when taking care of huge hospital bill. It will have a awful result on your credit report and dampen your possibilities of receiving a loan or a job in future. Credit card payment is nothing more than a standby arrangement because the bill is only shifted from one source to another. Earlier you owed the health care provider, now you owe the credit card company.
Most people don’t think relating to negotiating even if their hospital bill is out of their potential to clear. To negotiate medical bills with the medical provider for a hospital bill is not any different than negotiating with a vender for some other deal.
First step in negotiating medical bills is to go through a detailed statement of your bill to see that you only pay for services that were provided to you. Go and check with Medicaid to see that the medical provider has not charged you extra for any service. Also ensure that you know what expenses of the bill will be paid by your insurance provider. (more…)
A number of times a physically and mentally tormenting stage of ailment is followed by a financially challenging one where the patients are left to clear outrageous medical bills and debt. Let’s check how you can properly take care of yourself to come out of this stage.
The first and foremost thing that you must do after you get discharged from the medical provider is to call their finance department for a detailed bill to be sent to you. You need to go through the entire bill in detail to check that every single charge in the bill is correct and valid.
If you find any correction on the bill, you must instantaneously raise a dispute in the hospital. If the service hospital is not understanding you should instantly visit your state’s health department to get your medical bills and debt corrected. (more…)
In this unprecedented erratic economy that we are living in today, you are not alone who is fighting the issue of past due medical bills – there are most others like you. As the accumulation of bills and the total owed amount keeps getting higher and higher, the chances of being able to clear the bills keep getting lesser and lesser. So let’s readily discuss some vital details with regard to clearing the hospital bills.
The first obvious thing that you ought to do is to look through your budget thoroughly. If the mention of the word budget creates questions in your mind, then that’s exactly the reason that you have unpaid bills in the first place because of which they have piled up and entered past due phase.
Preparing a budget is a very simple process of calculating your monthly income along with the expenses and savings to keep a tab on where the money is flowing to.
Get an itemized copy of your total past due medical bills that you owe and go through them quickly in details. The objective of going over these bills is to make sure that you have only been charged for the services that you were provided by the service hospital and nothing else. (more…)
When Americans think of a person trapped in enormous amounts of debt, inevitably they think of irresponsibility. They think of fast cars and fancy stereo equipment. They think of people living the high life who could not afford it. In short, they think of a deadbeat. If statistics are any real measure, this impression could merit a change – and a touch of sympathy.
Far from financial irresponsibility, medical expenses are among the most frequent causes of families falling into debt and eventually filing for bankruptcy. The precise percentage of medical bankruptcies is in dispute. However, it is generally acknowledged to be a significant number.
Estimates for the number of “medical bankruptcies” have a wide range. A Northwestern University researcher has placed the figure at 17 percent of all bankruptcies. A group of Harvard researchers have recently increased their estimate to more than 50 percent. According to a Federal Reserve report, households with high medical debt are 28 times as likely to file for bankruptcy as other households. Most recently, an August report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research estimated that one in seven Californians carries some form of medical debt. With the nation gripped in a discussion about public financing of medical care, the number of medical bankruptcies has become a topic of note. (more…)