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Negotiating with your doctor or hospital can definitely help you lower your medical bills. Many people don’t think of negotiating this way. You can negotiate with the seller when purchasing a home, and you negotiate on the price of a car – and you can surely negotiate with your doctor or hospital regarding medical debt. You have a good chance to get your debt under control and to stay away from filing for bankruptcy. Paying by credit card is not the answer because you cut your options or ability to negotiate with your medical professional, as the credit card company holds your debt now.

So How Do You Negotiate Medical Debt?

Do Your Research First

Understand that their is an act called the “Fair Debt Collection Act” that requires debt collectors to “treat you fairly and prohibits certain methods of debt collection.” Next, make sure to double check all medical charges you have received from your bills. Sometimes before negotiating it is best to get an “itemized bill” so you can see all the things you were charged for in detail. Make sure you were only charged for the services given to you. An itemized bill is needed because many doctors, hospitals and pharmacists make mistakes. With Medicaid, check your bill and make sure that you were not billed more than what is allowed. In the case of private insurance, make sure you review all your health insurance coverage, because sometimes some or all of the balance could be paid for by your health insurance company.

Approach Negotiation With The Right Style

Make sure to be delicate in your negotiation approach. For example, if you want bank to waive a bank fee, yelling at the customer service rep is less likely to lead to the removal of your fee than keeping calm and yet still direct. Explain to your hospital or doctor why you can’t pay. Usually they will understand if you have valid or reasonable reasons. You effectively need to prove that the charges received are too high for the income and expenses you have. Keep your cool as you want to sound in control, which only helps you in the negotiation process.

Requirements During The Process

First, act quickly, and be proactive. Second, Make sure to keep in contact with your creditors (organizations you owe money to such as physician, doctor, medical organization or hospital) and record all of the names and phone numbers of anyone you speak or spoke to. Make sure you document all the things you did, when you did them, and the outcome. If you have a call with a creditor, then try to record it if your state allows it as 35 states do. Third, never negotiate over the phone, or make sure any agreements or terms or via email or snail mail.

What To Strive For In Negotiation

First, you want to aim at having as many medical fees or underpayment penalties associated with your balance removed or reduced. Second, you want to negotiate a payment plan. Your physician, doctor, medical organization or hospital will often times take smaller payments over a longer period of time than have you not pay at all — so try strive for a reasonable payment plan or one that you can afford. If you do reach an agreement with your creditor (payment plan or payment in full), document it and send it to your creditor. If you are paying by check add to it “Cashing Check Constitutes Payment In Full.” Third, never take the first offer you get if they are eager. You need to sense how eager or quickly they respond with an offer because if you can get a 2nd or 3rd one they usually improve. The tough part is knowing when you should take an agreement or request a better offer. Lastly, if all else fails remember you can always threaten with bankruptcy for a payment plan or better agreement because usually with bankruptcy — the creditor won’t get paid.

Many people who get into serious debt appear to do nothing about it, which can just makes matters worse. This inactivity is usually just to do with a lack of understanding about the best ways to deal with debt, though with some people there is also an element of hoping that if you ignore it long enough it might go away. The one thing you can be sure of is that it will not go away, but once you understand what you need to do, you can take steps yourself to become debt free once more.

If you ignore creditors and do not communicate with them, they will fill that vacuum with their own assumptions. In the absence of other information or any kind of relationship, it will be easy for them to assume that you could pay them back if you really wanted to, but are simply choosing to keep the money you owe. So the first thing you need to do is to acknowledge that you have a problem, be up front about the reasons that you are unable to pay, and assure them that you are serious about finding a way to resolve the situation.

When your financial situation gets beyond a certain point, it becomes pretty much impossible to find a way to pay back everything that you owe in full. If your debts are huge and your income small, this equation is unlikely to ever balance out. If you did have a steady income and a reasonable amount of money spare each month to put towards your debts, then you could look at a debt management plan. For many people, however, this is not an option because they cannot afford to keep up the required payments.

In such situations the only option other than bankruptcy is to negotiate settlements with your creditors. Rather than trying to find ways to pay back your debt in full, when you negotiate debt settlements you are trying to get your creditors to agree to write off a large part of what you owe them. Someone who knows how to negotiate debt effectively will normally manage to get well over half your debt wiped out. The flip side is that the remaining amount needs to be paid back relatively quickly, usually in one lump sum or a series of fairly quick payments. The fact that you do not have a large lump sum of cash sitting around for this purpose is not necessarily a problem, as this is usually the situation.

When thinking about how to negotiate debt you essentially have two options for how you move forward. You can either try to undertake the negotiations yourself or use a specialist debt settlement company to do it on your behalf. For UK residents it is worth mentioning that debt settlement companies do not really exist as they do in the US, because there is a formal scheme called an IVA, which is widely used to deal with the same situation. At the end of an IVA your remaining debts are written off, so the end result is the same as debt settlement.

By undertaking the negotiation yourself you save on having to pay any fees to a debt settlement or IVA company, but that is only worthwhile if you manage to get as much written off as they would have. You need to understand that simply trying to persuade a credit card company, for example, to let you off with 60% of what you owe them is not going to work unless you understand the details of how and why they might be prepared to do that.

Understanding how to negotiate debt settlements is about understanding how your creditors treat bad debts. Each company will have a slightly different policy on how they deal with such things, and knowing this is essential to being able to time your negotiations for maximum effect. There are times to ignore calls and offers from creditors and other times when your proposal is most likely to succeed.

It is certainly possible to negotiate deals that are as good as those achieved by the professional debt negotiators once you have a thorough understanding of how to negotiate debt properly. In order to achieve this you need to have a reliable source of information and advice on the debt negotiation process. There are various guides and learning sources available, but not all are of much real use. What you need is detailed advice from someone who understands the process inside out. A good guide should tell you when to call, what to say, when to write, what to write, and give you full step by step instructions. The best guides on how to negotiate debt are proper learning tools that even include one to one advice and ongoing support throughout your settlement process.

The alternative is to use a specialist company to negotiate debt settlements for you, for which they will take a percentage of what they manage to save. Going down this route is obviously much easier, though you will pocket a bit less of the savings achieved. Do exercise some caution over which company you use, as not all will deliver what they promise. It is best to follow recommendations for settlement companies that are known to be reliable and reputable, then approach at least three different ones.