A Prescription for Savings: How to Save on Medical Bills

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A Prescription for Savings: How to Save on Medical Bills

Huge medical bills, tremendous debt, a small income, and little to no help ? Yep, I've been there.

Two years ago, my (then) fiancé and I found ourselves in a very tough situation. A few days before New Year's Day, a firework exploded in his hand. After a few hours in surgery, he came out pretty sore but in good condition overall. He amazingly has full use of his hand, minus a little stiffness and arthritis.

As a young college-aged couple about to get married, we were faced with a very scary reality neither of us had experience with: an overwhelming amount of medical bills. He didn't have health insurance, so every bit of that debt was put on his shoulders with no one in his family able to help him financially. We were scared and somewhat hopeless. We knew that financial problems could lead to some tough times in a marriage. So, I made it my mission to find help, turning first to the internet.

Unfortunately, it was very hard to find good articles on how to get help with medical bills, so we took a few pieces of advice from websites and tried some new tricks of our own.

Here are the approaches we took to help cut down a substantial amount of our bills:

1. Charities and scholarships: Look for every possible charity effort or scholarship fund.  A social worker at the hospital told us while we were there that we could apply for a charity through them. We did that right away and can you guess what happened? They forgave almost every bit of his debt to that hospital and even to the clinics and providers that cared for him while he was there. We learned he had been forgiven close to $40,000 in debt – talk about an answered prayer!

2. Look over your bills: Inspect all of your bills initially to make sure there are no errors. If there are ever any questions or you're not sure how to read one, just call the company and ask them for help.

3. Ask for help: At one point we sent out sincere letters to each company he owed money to and asked them if there was any way that they could forgive any or all of his debt. One clinic forgave over $3,000 for physical therapy after they got the letter!

4. Medical loans: The physical therapy clinic set us up with a medical loan that we c...

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