A few fun facts! All of this I learned after being near death and spending a week in critical care in a hospital that didnāt offer any sort of charity assistance and I was uninsured.
(Some do, so if you think youāre fād, check to see if they offer anything first.)
First of all: while dealing with a terrible kidney infection, a 104 fever that had been going for a week, and who knows what else, a nice lady from their finance department came to me with some paperwork to sign. Luckily I was so out of it (I had even spelled my name wrong when I first checked in because I was so out of it) that I said I couldnāt (which was true).
I later learned what she was asking me to sign was some sort of a ālienā which would have given them all the rights to come after me and re-posses any property I had later to make up for the debt.
So, whatever you do when youāre sick, if you donāt understand something do NOT sign it.
Since then I got calls for a few years from a debt collector, I never talked to them, said I wasnāt available, whatever. Eventually they stopped calling.
I owe a hospital about $700,000 for having the audacity to have a kidney infection and an autoimmune disease which were trying to kill me simultaneously.
That was probably 5 years ago. From what everyone has told me, it canāt effect my credit. Medical debt can not effect your credit. Also, now that Iām no longer being harassed by those debt collectors, I never hear from anyone.
To me in the end, I learned to simply walk away from it, and I won, as far as I can tell.
I know the OP was making a joke, but I thought Iād put out some info in case anyone out there has the unfortunate luck to get critically sick in the US without insurance, because seriously itās really fucking expensive.
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