“People with health insurance may now represent the majority of debtors American hospitals struggle to collect from, according to medical billing analysts,” Jessica Glenza writes over at the Guardian. “This marks a sea change from just a few years ago, when people with health insurance represented only about one in 10 bills hospitals considered ‘bad debt,’ analysts said. ‘We always used to consider bad debt, especially bad debt write-offs from a hospital perspective, those [patients] that have the ability to pay but don’t,’ said Colleen Hall, senior vice-president for Kodiak Solutions, a billing, accounting and consulting firm that works closely with hospitals and performed the analysis. ‘Now, it’s not as if these patients across the board are even able to pay, because [out-of-pocket costs are] such an astronomical amount related to what their general income might be.’ … Those who work in the hospital billing industry say it shows how complex health insurance products with large out-of-pocket costs have proliferated. ‘What we noticed was a breaking point right around the 2018-2019 timeframe,’ said Matt Szaflarski, director of revenue cycle intelligence at Kodiak Solutions. … In 2018, just 11.1% of hospitals’ bad debt came from insured ‘self-pay’ accounts, or from patients whose insurance required out-of-pocket payments, according to Kodiak. By 2022, the proportion who did (or could) not pay their bills soared to 57.6% of all hospitals’ bad debt.” Jessica Glenza, “Majority of debtors to US hospitals now people with health insurance,” The Guardian.
