Hit With a Big Medical Bill? Do This.

Doctors’ offices and hospitals sometimes send the invoice for your care to you before they submit it to your insurance, says Linda Michelson, founder of the Medical Billing Advocate, a service that helps individuals negotiate high healthcare costs. If you get a bill from your provider, first confirm that the bill has been properly submitted to your insurer. After it is, you’ll receive an explanation of benefits from your Medicare plan showing what it covered and how much you owe.

Here’s a stunning number: Nearly half of all medical bills contain errors, according to the Patient Advocate Foundation, an advocacy group that helps people negotiate big bills. Make sure your provider gives you a line-by-line itemized invoice, and be on the lookout for duplicate charges, bills that should have been covered (but weren’t), and charges for services you didn’t actually receive.

Report errors to the provider, and ask that a revised bill be submitted to your insurer, Michelson says.

Consider hiring a patient advocate to do this on your behalf. This pro can comb through the charges on your bills to determine which ones are reasonable and customary—and which aren’t—and then work with the provider to lower or eliminate them.

Don’t pay right away. Instead, ask for verification of the debt, which they must send within seven days, in writing, along with the original bill, to confirm that it’s correct.

If it isn’t, contact the collection agency both by certified mail and by phone to alert them that you’re disputing it. They must cease collections for 30 days so you can gather evidence that you or your insurer already paid the bill, that you’re not the debtor but are being billed due to an identity mix-up, or that the debt is no longer able to be collected. In some states, unpaid debt of any kind, including medical, is no longer eligible for collections after a set period of time.

In New York, for example, it’s illegal to try to collect a debt older than three years.