this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Not that I question the unsourced anecdotes of the God account, but I'd be genuinely curious to see a business that thought an astronomical legal bill would be worth garnishing the wages of a service sector worker.
As someone with family in the legal profession and the medical billing profession, it's crazy to think of the cost-benefit of pursuing this kind of claim given the return expected. Hospitals write off millions a year in "bad debt", because collection is consistently more expensive than the real value of these claims.
Can hospitals still sell their debts to third party collection agencies? Those groups seem like exactly the type to garnish McD wages.
Collection agencies will buy hospital debt at pennies on the dollar. And then collection agencies can try to annoy you into paying. But they have an even weaker claim on your debt than the original hospital. Getting a court to agree to garnish wages is a drawn out process. And it can be easily circumvented if you quit your job and take up employment somewhere else. In the service sector, that happens so routinely as to make wage garnishment a fool's errand.
I've had my wages garnished from an ambulance trip. 18Y/o me was insanely confused when HR pulled me aside to let me know.
They ended up only getting a few hundred Bucks, how could that possibly have been worth it for them? In any case if they would do that to me it wouldnt surprise me to hear they do it to others as well.
If the debt collector bought the debt for pennies on the dollar, there are edge cases. Even then, it's an expensive process to try and only works as long as you're rooted in a particular job. As soon as you leave, the collectors have to go back and refile all their claims against you against the new employer.
So it generally isn't worth the time, which is why the post is sus.
John Oliver bought a bunch to forgive if I remember correctly.
My brother in law had a medical bill that was supposed to be covered by insurance, but they didn't pay. (A small-ish bill of a few thousand dollars) His bill was sent to collections, and they hounded him for years, despite him having in writing that the insurance and hospital both agreed that the insurance was supposed to cover it. After 8 years, they started garnishing his wages. This is when he decided to get a lawyer involved, and he was able to successfully sue the hospital for garnishing wages illegally. The hospital had to pay out 30K.
All that to say, hospitals aren't always acting intelligently or legally.
How did they garnish his wages without having a court involved? They would had to have sued him already in court.
I think he was served papers at one point around the 3-4 year mark, but just told the hospital he wasn't going to pay since they already had agreed in writing he didn't have to pay. He never went to court. I don't know the exact process, it was never explained to my brother in law, but given they had a valid, unpaid bill of 8 years (and multiple attempts to get him to pay on record) was enough?
Yeah, that's a default judgement then. If you're served, you need to respond, or else the judge declares in favor of the plaintiff.
Sure, I understand that the judge didn't do anything wrong, but the hospital was wrong to even try garnishing wages in the first place
You'll get no disagreement from me, the system is broken.
Right. Which is why I'd like to see the actual story and not some vague anecdote by a novelty account.
Fair enough, I was just getting at the fact that this isn't far from something I've seen a hospital do firsthand, and thus doesn't feel like a fake story to me
They legally cannot garnish more than 25% of your earnings after taxes
Edit Op is correct
And with a 25-30% tax rate that makes the pre-tax skim 35.7% .
Garnishment percentage is calculated based on income after taxes/social security/etc.
Fuck I better start paying my medical bills
i worked also in the data transfer and reporting portion of hosp billing and can tell you, from the pov of the folks with two commas in their salaries, it’s all just bog standard heartless capitalism to them.
You don't. You sell those to debt collection agencies and they garnish the wages.
Wage garnishment happens at the end of a long series of legal filings and claims against the debtor.
And, again, you can avoid it by changing jobs. Which is easy enough for someone in a low wage service sector that very few debt collectors bother trying.
You tend to push for wage garnishment when the person is in a job they can't easily leave - partner at a law firm, manager at a Fortune 500 company, tenured professor - not someone who can walk across the street and land a new job doing the same work at the same pay over the weekend.
So this goes through the employer then? Not through like the IRS who can just take stuff from any paycheck?
So if you owe money to some federal entity or a state entity, they can skip the line and garnish your wages, but if it's just some collections agency, they would have to sue you first, and only with a court order could they garnish your wages.
The IRS withholds taxes from your paystub based on your W2. You can technically zero out your withholdings from the IRS, but this can incur penalties and it exposes your employer to annoying audit requests, so its discouraged at the HR level.
Paycheck withholds that come through a court order are something different entirely. And you'd really need to sit down with an actual Employment Law expert to get the fine details, as they can vary by state and county as well as by how you get paid (salary versus contractor, etc). Which agent actually gets to deduct money from your paystub, how it is escrowed, when the collector can access the money, how that deducts from your total debts, etc isn't federalized.
But I can say with some degree of confidence that unless you owe money to the IRS, the IRS isn't involved.
I'm not sure people change jobs very easily in this economy. But your point is valid.
They send it to collections, collections hands it off to a lawyer who files in court, court sends a beer date, person can't afford to take off for the day, so court issues a default judgment.
The system does not care about one's circumstances if one is too poor to advocate for themselves.
Add a dash of depression, anxiety and stress and this is a very believable scenario for anyone who is even of adequate means.
Lawyer sends the collections agency a bill for 10x the collections amount.
I'd argue that the actual truth of that story is totally secondary. It might be false and probably is, but the main premise of a draining, soul-crushing "healthcare" system is the point. And nobody would probably question that.
This anectode being wrong would not change it.
Making up stories to prove a position only weakens the position, IMO. We have plenty of real life stories why the healthcare indsutry (shouldn't even have to call it an industry) is disgusting without needing to fabricate things.
I think it doesn't even need real life stories, everybody knows about it anyway. Even the people NOT in the USA do know. But basically you're right of course.