Needle stick injury during rotations; hospital won't pay for doing my bloodwork

I had a hospital system charge me for the emergency room visit I had to do when I was attacked during my shift at that hospital by a psych patient wielding a shard of broken glass coated with her blood because I interrupted her suicidal gesture. They flunked their billing attempt with worker's comp and decided to go after me, going so far as to send me to collections for several months over it.

I learned something very important. Do you know what happens when you don't pay a medical bill like that? Very little. It might put a ding on your credit record and bill collectors will harass you until you exercise your legal rights to stop them from doing so. But all that will go away with time, and you can put a note on your credit report contesting it. Heck, so many people have unpaid medical debt on their reports that it doesn't really significantly impact credit decisions most of the time. It isn't worth their time or expense to sue you. They will harass you until you tell them to stop, and then they will eventually write it off. For a few years, it will show up on your credit report, and then it will fall off, like it never happened.

So, that is your worst case scenario. (Yes, you do need decent credit if you need to take Grad Plus loans for school, but there are very specific guidelines for how much debt you can default on before you need a cosigner, and from personal experience (see above), I can tell you that it is more than $2000.

I'm not saying that telling them to get bent should be your first action. But it is important to know what is the worst that can happen, so that you aren't needlessly stressing about worse, imagined outcomes. So, since there is no way they can extract payment from you, that provides them an incentive to work with you. Approach the hospital, not your school. Go up the chain, negotiate, ask them to forgive the debt, or a major portion of it. If you keep asking, and if it becomes clear to them that you aren't going to pay them $2k, they may get a lot more cooperative.

You were advised to go to the ED for treatment. It isn't as if you decided on your own to go there, on a lark. You were advised that your care would not be billed to you, by people who likely believed that, and you relied on that information, which was provided to you by the staff of that hospital. Based upon that, it isn't clear that you do owe this bill. It isn't wrong to ask for it to be written off.

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Needle stick injury during rotations; hospital won't pay for doing my bloodwork