My wife works for CT based health system. The amount of bad debt they had to write off a few years ago was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In the urban centers of CT, they don’t pay their bills anyway.
And it costs those of us who do.
A lot of medical facilities in the Southwest have been going out of business for decades - mostly due to illegal immigration. (Illegals use it as their Primary Care.)
But how do they calculate bad debt? A hospital charges Medicare 10k for a service, and 12k to a private insurer, and 50k to the unfortunate person with no insurance or bad insurance. If that person cannot or will not pay, did the hospital really write off a debt of 50k? They certainly did lose 50k.
I am a person with bad insurance, and medical debt for half my income. I should be able to negotiate it down to a fifth or a quarter of what it presently is, if there is any justice,but I don’t know.