this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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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