Fighting with hospitals and medical bills can wear you down
Posted By RichC on May 31, 2026
Ignore this, it’s yet another RANT about health care and billing after losing a long battle with hospital billing and insurance companies from a few years ago. We once thought an appearance of extra bills from Brenda’s hospital stay back in early 2023 were “negotiated,” but unfortunately they found their way to court in 2026.
We have learned (from our own and our parents experiences) to wait about 6 months before paying “our part” after insurance claims are settled so we know exactly how much out of pocket to either pay or dispute. For Brenda’s 2023 very successful hip replacement surgery (“Praise the Lord” as MomH would say), we did exactly that … knowing that it takes a while for all billing to work its way through the system. Eventually Brenda made the call and negotiated “our” finally out-of-pocket payment (still significant) and washed our hands of the shockingly high over charges. Well at least we thought it was behind us.
In 2025 she started to get recurring calls from the hospital’s collection people and forcefully tells them this was fully paid. They “claimed” that some additional bills came in after our payment and that we still owed another $3500. Eventually Brenda butted heads with these collection annoyances and received only letters. Fast forward to the spring of 2026 (likely while we were in Florida) – an lawfirm took over the collections and filed with the local courts. So … we were now either going to be faced with going to court (and those costs) … or be done with it by settling with the law firm and have the case dismissed.
Who really wants to hire an attorney and go to court … especially if OUR record keeping from phone calls in 2023 aren’t all that documented? Part of me wants to fight the hospital and “doctor we never heard of’s” bills that came rolling in over a half year after the procedure … while the “normal” part of us just wants this frustration 
behind us.
The “normal” part of us won out and so we called to get the case dismissed by paying the outstanding bills that really should have been in that “first 6 month” wave of bills … and were not clear or explained, who even was this extra doctor? (Audio by AWS Polly)
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