Jeff and Kareen King joined a medical cost-sharing plan advertised as a “refreshing non-insurance approach” to paying for health care. It had a big proviso: Preexisting conditions like Jeff’s heart condition were not fully covered for the first two years. He needed heart surgery after just 16 months.
Monica Reed was the first in her family to own a home and has lived “a frugal kind of life.” Cancer treatment left her with almost $10,000 in debt, pushing her to the edge financially.
An examination of billing policies and practices at more than 500 hospitals across the country shows widespread reliance on aggressive collection tactics.
Coal mining ended in Germany’s Saarland a decade ago, but the transition away from coal has been smoother than in West Virginia, which has more medical debt than any state in America.
Hospitals strike deals with financing companies, generating profits for lenders, and more debt for patients.
Despite the end of Jim Crow segregation, its legacy lives on in medical debt that disproportionately burdens Black communities.
A youth mental health crisis and a shortage of therapists and other care providers who take insurance are pushing many families into financial ruin. But it’s rarely acknowledged as medical debt.
New policies to prevent unpaid medical bills from harming people’s credit scores are on the way. But the concessions made by top credit reporting companies may fall short for those with the largest debt — especially Black Americans in the South.
Penny Wingard, 58, of Charlotte, North Carolina, worries she won’t ever get out from under her medical debt despite new policies that are supposed to prevent medical debt from harming people’s credit scores.
Some hospitals notch big profits while patients are pushed into debt by skyrocketing medical prices and high deductibles, a KHN analysis finds.
