Medical bills and CCs
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| Sat, 10-11-2008 - 12:56pm |
so I finally faced reality and wrote down all of our bills with the monthly payments. The good news is that we have enough to pay all the bills. The bad news is that there's not much left for necessities like food and gas. The CCs are killing us, but we're also paying $300 a month in payments on medical bills. I'm paying two hospitals $150 a month each. When I set up the payment plan they made it sound like that was the minimum I could pay. At the time we could afford it, but now it seems crazy to me to be paying that much on a no interest debt and be paying 28% in CCs (until we can find a way to get it lowered). Are hospitals usually willing to renegotiate payment plans?
The other question I had was about another medical debt. DD was sick and ended up in the hospital. For some reason the ER docs were considered out of network, even though the hospital is in network. The insurance paid it in full (I'm assuming because it was at an in-network hospital), but they sent us checks, instead of paying them directly. I'm trying to decide if it's a good idea to put that money (about $1000) toward one of the CCs and then negotiate a payment plan when the bills come in. I'm torn because that seems like it will cost us the least, but that will add another monthly payment. But it will also buy us some time.
I'm just trying to figure out the best way to get out of this mess. :(






Dear Amy,
My husband and I are deeply in debt with the CC's and medical debt.
A lot of the medical debt we put onto charge cards, as we thought we had to pay it, and we didn't realize that by doing that, we then didn't have good records of what all we had paid for tax purposes, as you can get deductions.
But, a large portion of our medical bills got put onto a medical charge card called Medicredit, which charges 8% interest.
We were paying about $600 a month to Medicredit, and had paid off a good bit, of the $40,000 we owed, and we were struggling to make ends meet as we were paying $600 a month on CC's and $600 to my brother for a loan he had given us.
I called the Medicredit place and asked if we could have a lower payment, and without a quibble, they reduced the payment down to $350 a month, almost half what we had been paying.
It is frustrating what a long tough struggle we have ahead of us, but you can ask for lower payments and get them, which at least helps with making it through month to month.
I have heard that you can do the same with charge card payments as well, but we haven't done it, as we plan to move, and might need to finance the move on the CC's and know that if we call them up and say we need the payments lowered we would almost be guaranteed that our line of credit with them would be cancelled.
Once we are moved, I may make that call as well.
Good Luck Amy, and your kids are real cuties,
Sincerely, Linda
If the 1000.00 will pay off the 28% credit card then give it to them and make arrangements on the hospital bill. because it is no interest. If the 1000.00 doesn't pay off the credit card I would still keep in mind you need to find a card where you can transfer that money out at a lot lower rate.
And when you are figuring