Anna Wilde Mathews

speaker

275 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2017 last heard Sep 2023

Anna Wilde Mathews’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · How to Negotiate Medical Bills · 15 Nov 2021 podcast

Say, hey, I see Medicare pays this amount.

That's really what I'd like to pay as well.

And you can ask for a payment plan, but definitely what you don't want to do is just ignore the bill and let it fester because that will result in potentially you being sent to collections.

Well, that's still a process.

And you definitely, similar to what you should do with the hospital before it gets sent to collections, you should engage with them.

You don't want to ignore it because when you ignore it, it doesn't go away and things tend to get worse.

So you should try to talk to the collection agency, try to work out a payment plan.

You can even try to go back to the hospital, although, again, once it's in collections, you probably have to engage with the collection agency.

If you aren't engaged with them, unpaid bills often do get reported to the credit bureaus.

They have agreed to wait 180 days after the medical debt becomes delinquent before including it in your credit report, though.

So you do have still some time.

after it gets sent to the credit bureau to try to work something out.

Well, it is challenging, but hospitals want to get something out of you if they can.

And realistically, so many big bills, people don't pay anything at all.

So if they have the prospect of getting something quickly and getting something at all,

That might be better for them than getting nothing, but there is no guarantee.

And sometimes they're just going to draw a line and say, this is what you owe and this is what we want.

They can be tough.

One thing you can consider is working with a healthcare advocate.

These are people who routinely negotiate bills.

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