Hallelujah! I just made the final payment on Liam's bill from Children's Memorial Hospital* -- a bill we have been paying for three years! And, in just two short months, we will be completely finished paying off his medical debt, with the exception of a monthly charge for catheters. There will be plenty more bills in the future, of course, but, for now, I am breathing a little bit easier.
When the bills first started coming in, I felt like I was drowning. I thought for sure they were going to take us under. The "most bankruptcies are caused by medical debt" statistic ran through my head on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. I knew we needed a plan. But because I was dealing with so much guilt at the time -- guilt about Liam being born with spina bifida -- I wouldn't ask my (very new) husband for more money. I didn't want to put any more of a burden on him than I felt I already had. I didn't feel like I deserved to ask for what I needed. And we got married so quickly that there wasn't really time for any major discussions about finances, except for the initial one, before Liam's diagnosis, where we decided I would leave my job (since I would essentially be a single parent while he continued to work in Kuwait), and decided on a monthly amount I would receive. Of course this amount was decided before we knew anything about doctor bills or traveling to doctor appointments or even just the extra diapers Liam would go through. Things have changed a lot since then. I finally broke down the first time he came home from Kuwait, when Liam was five months old. I cried and said I couldn't live with the guilt anymore. I told him I worried all the time that he got stuck with me, to which he simply responded: "No, you don't understand. You got stuck with me. You'll see." I started making payments on our medical bills shortly after that.
The first few months after Liam was born were a whirlwind of surgeries, hospital stays, and traveling to Chicago for weekly doctor appointments. At that point I wasn't even opening the mail, but you can only ignore bills for so long. That first year was tough: I could mail out $1500 worth of payments, only to receive a new $2000 bill in the mail the next day. There was more coming in than there was going out for awhile, but I stayed determined. Liam's out-of-pocket medical expenses have totaled almost $30,000 so far, and that doesn't even include the amount that gets deducted from our paycheck in order to pay for our health insurance policy or traveling expenses (at the time we lived 3 hours from Chicago), which would put the total well over $50,000. Liam is worth every penny, of course.
So here's how we did it:
1. I started making small monthly payments on each account; in the beginning this meant monthly payments on as many as fifteen different accounts. Children's Memorial consolidates all services into one bill, but Carle Foundation and Sarah Bush separate each charge: lab work, ultrasounds, doctors, hospital stays, anesthesiologists, surgeons, etc. So even if I was only able to make $25 or $50 payments on each individual account, I did so in order to remain current, and keep the accounts from going to collections.
2. Because the medical bills are interest-free and we also have student loan debt, we decided there was no reason to rapidly pay off the medical debt, even though sometimes I thought that would make me feel a little less like I was drowning. But I knew choosing to pay more on medical debt versus student loan debt would be like putting money into savings when you have credit card debt (that isn't zero percent interest). It simply didn't make sense financially. So we took our time, but remained consistent.
3. Make a deal with the hospital billing department. Although I filled out countless forms for each hospital discount program, we didn't qualify for any. Liam also doesn't qualify for Social Security/Disability benefits (this may change in the future when we switch jobs and/or have more kids). Even the Early Intervention services offered by the state, which are usually free, cost us a monthly fee. Of course, depending on how you look at it, this is a good problem to have, even if having a great job comes with a lot of sacrifices (like missing your child's birth or living/working on another continent for the first two and a half years of his life). Sometimes these sacrifices would feel like too much, and I'd jokingly say to him: "why don't you just come home, work as little as possible, and we'll live off the government?" To which my husband would quickly respond: "are you sure you're not a republican?!" Anyways, even though we didn't qualify for the hospital discount programs, we were able to save a few hundred dollars on some of the bills, by making a "prompt payment." All you have to do is call the hospital and ask if they will negotiate with you if you're able to pay the bill in full. Or sometimes the hospitals will even send a letter offering you a deal in return for payment in full.
4. A little bit of luck (and a really good insurance policy). For one year, my husband's company offered Cigna health insurance. That plan had a $1500 out-of-pocket yearly maximum, which means everything after that initial $1500 was covered 100 percent. We hit that maximum after one full day of appointments! I can't tell you how good it felt to receive bills for an entire year that said "services covered 100 percent." They've since changed to Aetna, which typically covers 80 percent, while we pay the other 20 percent. And the tricky part about our plan now is that we can never quite seem to hit the out-of-pocket yearly maximum, because they use a tiered system, making it almost impossible to hit the maximum in any given tier -- you'd have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in order to hit the yearly max. Totally ridiculous. But just having that one year without any new bills coming in really allowed us to make a dent in our debt.
And that's how we did it. Two more months and we'll be free! Well, at least until Liam's next set of appointments in September.
*Okay, so I know Children's Memorial is now called Lurie Children's Hospital, but I don't like change. Let's face it: I still call the Panther Paw by its old name, Stix. And I was still flipping a cassette tape to Side B, even after MP3 players were invented.
*Update: July 10, 2013 -- We are 100% medical debt free! Just in time to take on some mortgage debt... It never ends, does it?! But I'm still breathing a huge sigh of relief. :)
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