A doctor’s medical billing company has been insisting for over a year I owe them over a thousand dollars. I do not - I already paid that bill. I have proof of this.
I suspect they have sent me to a debt collector (hard to tell, what with all the scammer calls I get, but it looks like one of the numbers might be a legit company). This debt is not mine.
What recourse do I have?
(Yes, I have a lawyer I use for legal stuff, I’m assuming at some point I need to contact him)
If you speak with the collector on the phone, do not agree to ANYTHING. Ask them to send you proof of the debt. They should, if they’re not too scammy, provide you with information about how to prove to them that you’ve already paid the bill in question.
Yeah, except I’ll need to be a new-to-me vehicle in the near future and I don’t want this screwing up my credit rating and messing with getting a loan.
I don’t intimidate, I get angry. Not flying-off-the-handle angry, more I’ll-get-a-lawyer-and-see-you-in-court-asshole followed by neener-neener-I-won-pay-up-MF’er,
Have your lawyer send a cease and desist letter via Certified Mail along with evidence that the bill was paid to the billing company and cc: the physician in question. If the billing company follows up with anything other than an acknowledgement of their error, you will have evidence that they have been informed of the error and the basis for a lawsuit to obtain a court order to force the billing company and/or collection agency to desist, and potentially to recover legal fees and damages.
There are also state and federal regulations for billing compliance which regulate how long billers can wait to submit bills, when they can send a bill to a collections agency or report it to credit ratings agencies, et cetera. Your lawyer should be able to research this or contract to a paralegal specializing in medical billing compliance.
A good lawyer will save you money by taking steps to avoid problems such as not having a trail of documentation demonstrating your efforts to correct the problem, lost time at work dealing with the billing agency, spending time to correct a damaged credit rating, et cetera. Credit rating agencies don’t give a fuck whether it is a ‘false debt’ or not; if it is reported, it goes into your credit history and getting that corrected, even when you have all of the documentation at hand, can take months or years.
Drafting a cease and desist letter will cost an hour of a paralegal’s time and whatever retainer a lawyer might expect against further action; maybe $200 or a bit more. You can easily burn that much in your labor with a bunch of back and forth telephone games or emails without coming to a resolution. And while you can find boilerplate C&D letters, a lawyer or paralegal will know what to put into it to assure that in a legal challenge the biller will be obviously in the wrong.
And I sympathize with the billing company / morons thing. I’ve had a nonexistent debt reported to a collection agency due to similar screwups.
A few years back, my daughter saw a doctor who had very poor business practices, 6 or so months later, we got a bill from her billing service saying we owned a few hundred dollars.
I sent in proof that we’d paid everything we owed. I spoke with someone at the service, who said that they were actually severing connections with that doctor because her administration was so bad (evidently in our case, she had not notified them of the payments that had been made).
Do keep an eye on your credit rating. I think (but could be wrong) that if there’s a dispute, they can’t count that against you; I also think that you can add a statement to your credit profile explaining why such-and-such is bullshit; a lender might look at that and decide that you’re a good risk anyway.
The cost of a lawyer is “fairly steep and completely unnecessary” until you find yourself with a crap credit rating and bill collectors hounding you and even trying to garnish your salary for the bill and accumulated interest.
I had a problem with a previous integrated medical provider trying to bill me for services that not only did I not receive but quite obviously would have no use for, and despite the fact that the insurance component concurred that the expenses were incorrectly applied, the medical component continued to try to collect it from me personally instead of going through their ‘integrated’ insurer, and threatened to send the bill to a collections agency. A cease and desist order along with a clear statement about how I could not have possibly received the purported medical treatment put a stop to that and prevented a hit to my credit rating.
I had an art store come at me for not paying for a piece that we purchased and had framed. They called me and I told them that yes, we had payed for it at the time we picked it up from the store. They wanted me to come in and show them the receipt, which I refused to do (initially). I told them that (1) I could not have left the store without paying, and (2) their sloppy bookkeeping was not my problem. They eventually got threatening about it, so I took the receipt in, showed it to them, and told them that I would be warning everyone I knew to avoid patronizing their business. Turned out that the guy who took in the money was not good at keeping receipt copies filed.
I’ve never had a problem regarding a legit bill that I already paid . It’s always been something the doctor’s billing company did wrong with my insurance - but you say you have proof that you paid the bill. Did you send it to the billing company? What did they say? Second, why do you suspect that it was sent to a collection agency? Is it just because a phone call you didn’t answer seems to be connected to a collection agency or is it something more ? I ask because some loan applications ask for “references” - which aren’t really references, they are to be used in skip-tracing. So the collection agency calls may not even be about you.
If it turns out that the doctor’s office did in fact sell the debt to a collections agency someone at the billing agency should be able to tell you which one. Either way, you can get a copy of your credit reports and see if it’s on there. ( I think you can still get a free one monthly) My guess is that it won’t be.
Looks like the cost of getting such a letter from an attorney’s office has gone up considerably since the time I needed the service years ago. It can be very effective.
A cheap option is to send a certified letter to the bozos cc’ing your lawyer (or a scary-sounding law practice whose name you got from an online directory), whether or not you actually cc them.
This is not bad advice. However, it’s their burden to prove you owe it, not your burden to prove you don’t. I once had a collection outfit contact me about an unpaid hospital bill. I said, “I have no relationship with you, if anyone has a beef, it’s the hospital.” They replied that they took over the debt from the hospital. (I forget the exact terms they used). I said, “fine, send me proof of that and we can talk. Until then, I don’t know you.” Never heard from them again.
Having a lawyer send the letter might be cheaper; I’m assuming a ~$50 labor and overhead for a paralegal and a minimal retainer but it isn’t as if you need a high powered law firm to write a letter; some guy with a law degree from the University of American Samoa operating out of the back room of a nail salon is just as good for this purpose, and he can probably hook you up with a doctor who will help you make money if you don’t mind taking a few pratfalls.
You can draft your own cease and desist letter, which from a evidential standpoint is just as valid, but billing and collection agencies are more likely to take note when it comes on the letterhead of a law firm.
That is true in theory—and they know it, hence why a C&D on legal letterhead is likely to get them to stop hassling you—but in practice medical billing mixups are very common, often difficult to fix or get concurrence that there is an error, and once it gets reported to a rating agency untangling that web can take years.
Last time my lawyer wrote what I call a “scary lawyer letter” it cost me $50 total. Price might have gone up a bit, but my guy is pretty reasonable and he’s good.
That’s… pretty close to what’s happening here.
Last time I spoke with them they told me that they were suspending the bill pending review.
Then I got FOUR additional new bills the next week.
That’s when I got the patient advocates with the insurance companies and the hospital involved - this has been going on for awhile.
First, I am not answering your slew of questions. I think you mean well but it’s a privacy issue and I don’t feel like rehashing the whole saga on line. Going over how I got from an ER visit to here is not going to help, I have to deal with the present situation.
Second, the hang-up call this morning looks like it might be from an actual debt collector, but they didn’t leave a message. That disputed bill is the only thing I can think of that is likely to wind up in the “bad debt” bucket. Either that, or it’s identity theft, which happened to me back in 2012 but I got that resolved pretty quickly.
Until I can actually talk to a live human being I don’t really know. If they insist on calling me during my work hours they need to leave a message because most of the time at work I am simply not allowed to answer the phone. If they don’t leave a message I don’t know what happens.
I need to check my credit report, but not today - I’m too angry already and already have too many things to do before my day ends.
Just tell them you have medical insurance people who take care of doctors’ bills and, no, you don’t know how the debt collector can reach them, bye. It doesn’t need to be true and you can play as dumb as you like. If you haven’t already hung up…
“I’ve been advised to never discuss billing/medical/personal matters over the phone with strangers. Like you,” is a good line and unrefutably accurate. Another is that, “I don’t know anything about that but all correspondence must be delivered to the registered address,” the adress which regrettably also cannot be disclosed to a phone stranger.
A coworker of my gf is married to an attorney. She began receiving demands for payment involving a medical debt she’d paid in full. On advice of counsel/husband she ignored the gradually escalating demands.
Eventually she got court paperwork that she was being sued. She and her attorney/husband showed up at court with proof that the debt was paid , along with a motion for damages. Her husband kept track of every second he’d spent discussing the matter with his wife. His fees were outrageous, but legal. They won.