Bankruptcy Knoxville

If you’ve ever been sick or injured and thought you might be able to avoid high medical costs by avoiding the emergency room, think again. Many patients visiting an urgent care center or a doctor’s office are finding something very unexpected – hospital bills. Why does this happen? Consumers unwittingly visit an urgent care facility or a practice that is owned by a hospital. So even if you visited for a sore throat or a cut that happened working in the yard, you’ll be billed as if you visited an emergency room. It’s called a facility fee and it’s on top of the normal physician’s fees. Even if you’re insured it will drive up your costs.

What’s the natural byproduct of these business practices? Higher medical debt and bankruptcies. Kaiser Health News cites the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in this analysis:

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on another effect of high medical costs: “Although statistics are elusive, there is a general sense among bankruptcy lawyers and court officials, in Nashville as elsewhere, that the share of personal bankruptcies caused by illness is growing. In the campaign to broaden support for the overhaul of American health care, few arguments have packed as much rhetorical punch as the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God notion that average families, through no fault of their own, are going bankrupt because of medical debt.” The overhaul bills in Congress seek to address the problem in a few ways, mostly through expanding coverage and capping out-of-pocket costs, according to the Times.

“How many personal bankruptcies might be avoided is unpredictable, as it is not clear how often medical debt plays a back-breaking role. There were 1.1 million personal bankruptcy filings in 2008, including 12,500 in Nashville, and more are expected this year. Last summer, Harvard researchers published a headline-grabbing paper that concluded that illness or medical bills contributed to 62 percent of bankruptcies in 2007, up from about half in 2001.” According to the study, more than three-quarters of people with medical debt had health insurance.  Some experts have critiqued the researchers’ methodology as too broad. 

Do you have medical bills you can’t pay? Do you need someone to help you get the law on your side? Call us today for a free consultation.