Walletpop.com:
When she came down with the stomach flu, Mary Jane Sullivan, 52, was frightened — not because she worried that the flu would do her in but rather she didn’t think she could afford the trip to the doctor’s office. Unfortunately, Sullivan ended up in the ER instead, as a result of dehydration.
“I got a bill for more than $10,000 for 18 hours in the emergency room,” she says. Without insurance, Sullivan panicked. A friend suggested she try to “talk down” her bill. “She told me I might be able to talk to the billing department and get a discount,” Sullivan says.
After months of “wheeling, dealing and pleading,” Sullivan says she got the hospital to slash $2,700 off her bill. “I still owed a lot, but was grateful all the phone calls and letters shaved that much off.”…[Jason Beans, CEO of Rising Medical Solutions,] suggests patients research the rate Medicare reimburses a doctor for similar services. “Medicare might be too low, since they are the largest payer in the country and get nice discounts, or too high because they are the government, so they sometimes overpay. But this is a good baseline to see if your charges are reasonable or what the target range is you should try to negotiate down to,” says Beans.
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