We wiped out almost $10K of my roommate’s medical bills

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Hey there — Claire here.

Picking this story up with a big update on my roommate Margot’s battle against a $14,500 pile of medical bills from an accident this summer. We successfully scrubbed almost $10,000 out of the picture.

Here’s how we did it.

To catch you up, Margot followed a few crucial steps for anyone who gets a big bill in the mail:

Step 1: Don’t panic. Do NOT just pay it right away. (And don’t throw it away, either.)

Step 2: As the mail streams in, collect and organize all the documents you need to look into these charges. Then, investigate.

Comparing Margot’s medical bills and insurance-company mailings called explanation of benefits — EOBs for short — helped us identify almost $10,000 in charges we weren’t sure she owed.

Because for one ginormous hospital bill — we found no EOB.

Reminder: An EOB is a document that might look like junk mail, but it’s actually a crucial notice from your insurance that lays out how much you were charged for a medical service and how much of that sum your insurer is covering.

(In the weeks since we gave you some how-to-read-an-EOB tips, we found this piece from Business Insider that does an even better job, with an interactive graphic.)

How it has worked out for Margot, so far

So Margot looked over the no-EOB bill again, and she noticed a line titled “insurance payments/adjustments” with the number “zero” next to it.

OK. No EOB from her insurance. No insurance payments shown on the bill. Seemed like her insurance company hadn’t processed this bill at all.

Had they gotten it?

Margot thought back and realized she had no recollection of the hospital asking for her updated insurance information when she went to the ER.

It seemed likely that the hospital didn’t have Margot’s insurance on file at all — and that this huge bill was the sticker price for her treatment.

Margot logged into the hospital’s patient portal, messaged the hospital her insurance information, and waited.

Two weeks later, she got an updated bill for the visit totaling $679.17 — less than a tenth of the original charge.

This time, Margot’s insurance had kicked in and paid most of the bill, and Margot was left with this much, much smaller amount. And she got a matching EOB from her insurance company.

So, fixing this error shrunk Margot’s original debt from around $14,500 to a little over $5,000. We’re making progress!

Still, that win took time, effort, and patience. Over the course of months.

Margot didn’t receive all of her bills until mid-August, two months out from her initial hospital visit, and then it took her a couple of days to organize everything.

Later, I spent two caffeine-fueled evenings going through everything and taking notes.

Also, through so much of this fight, Margot’s been managing feelings of rage. She wondered how the hospital missed such an obvious detail — and she wasn’t super-satisfied with other elements of her care with this hospital, either.

“The new bill would have had to be zero dollars for me to be happy,” she said.

Plus… that was just our first round of bill fights. Since then, Margot’s had more surgeries and more bills, and she’s still waiting on some answers to questions our first investigation raised.

All to say, billing adventures can take a while, and can be emotionally exhausting. If you’re going through it, you’re not alone.

This chapter of Margot’s story represents just one type of billing error, that luckily, we sorted out without a lot of back-and-forth.

But sometimes hospitals and bill collectors don’t correct their mistakes the first time you ask and continue to hound you for money you don’t owe. On the podcast, we’ve chronicled some epic fights. Ugh.

The good news is, you have rights in this situation, and we’re going to talk about some of them next week.

Until then, some links from First Aid Kit editor and An Arm and a Leg’s senior producer Emily:

• This short video from STAT tries to answer the question: will Trump’s new tariffs increase the cost of drugs?

• Wendell Potter is a well known Cigna-exec-turned-whistleblower who Dan profiled a few years ago on the show. NY Mag found three more guys just like him and their “confessions” are super revealing. (Out from behind the paywall here.)

See you next week.

— Claire