Healthcare

Months after filing a lawsuit accusing a hospital network of “aggressively” seeking to collect $70 million from individuals who were eligible for charity care, the Attorney General of Washington has expanded his lawsuit to include a pair of collection agencies that allegedly failed to inform individuals about their eligibility. The …

As part of its ongoing investigation into how medical debts affect individuals across the country, Kaiser Health News (KHN) and National Public Radio (NPR) have published an article that details how some nursing homes are filing lawsuits to collect on unpaid debts, and the friends and family members of those …

The Attorney General of Minnesota has extended a regulatory agreement put in place with nonprofit hospitals operating in the state, as well as a for-profit hospital for the first time, that protects patients from “abusive, harassing, and deceptive practices when hospitals seek to collect medical debt.” Along with including all …

Changes that have been announced and started to be put into place regarding how information about medical debts are furnished to the credit reporting agencies will remove those debts from the credit reports of about half of all consumers, according to an analysis of the data published yesterday by the …

An advocacy group in New York is pushing Governor Kathy Hochul to sign a bill into law that would ban hospitals from obtaining garnishments and imposing liens to collect on unpaid medical debts, and has issued a report investigating the practice at five nonprofit hospitals in the state, concluding that …

One-fifth of patients who have visited healthcare facilities this year have received unexpected medical bills, despite the enactment of the No Surprises Act, and 22% of those who have received a bill have received one in excess of $1,000, according to the results of a nationwide survey. Surprise medical bills …

An organization seeking to put a measure on the ballot in Arizona this November that would increase the amounts that consumers can shield from garnishments to pay medical debts while also lowering the judgment interest rate on medical debt turned in twice as many signatures as needed last week, and …

More than half of adults in the United States have gone into debt in the past five years because of a medical or dental bill, according to the results of a nationwide survey, and about 20% of those adults say they don’t ever expect to fully repay those debts. The …

Issues with billing inaccuracies and “aggressive” tactics used by debt collectors to recover “allegedly unpaid” medical debts received top billing in a press release yesterday that was issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announcing that it had published its annual report on the top financial concerns facing servicemembers and …

The governor of Colorado yesterday signed a bill into law that will prohibit healthcare facilities from pursuing debt collection activities against individuals with unpaid medical bills unless those facilities are in compliance with federal price transparency guidelines. House Bill 1285 prohibits hospitals that are not in compliance with a price …