Assuming nobody else is at fault
Emergency rooms are legally required to provide treatment, and will do so even for non-life-threatening conditions.
If you don’t have insurance coverage but can pay, you will get a bill. If you can’t pay, in most cases the hospital will write off the debt.
Also quite often charities step in to help with the bill.
Most hospitals are setup as non-profit entities and use medical debt write-offs to exhibit their charity. In all truth, they intentionally drive their own expenses sky high to increase revenue to astronomical levels so to give executives running these organizations excessively high compensation. These write-offs are just part of the gig.
Hospitals haven’t been non profit since they were delayed in the early 1980s, and are absolutely structured for profit, with shareholders and conglomerate ownership and everything.
The medical write offs are exactly that. Tax avoidance.
They absolutely will not write off the debt in most cases. They’ll get you on a payment plan.
