Don’t get “bullied” into paying what you don’t owe

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2024

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Caitlyn Mai expected her share of a recent surgery bill to be about $2,000, with insurance covering the rest.

Then she started getting alerts on her phone from the hospital that she owed $139,000 — the full cost of her surgery.

But Caitlyn, a legal assistant in Oklahoma, instinctively knew a cardinal rule of the American healthcare system — “never pay the first bill.”

It’s a lesson we first heard from the journalist Marshall Allen, whose 2021 book Never Pay the First Bill serves as a how-to guide for anyone facing down a potentially bogus medical bill, and whose passing earlier this year left a giant hole in the hearts of many.

This episode is an extended version of a recent installment of the NPR and KFF Health News series Bill of the Month.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, one morning when she was in eighth grade,
0:02.8	Caitlin May did what she always did when she woke up.
0:05.4	Music has always been a big part of my life.
0:07.5	And so I immediately put in my headphones
0:11.1	and started putting on music as I was about to get out of bed and get ready and I noticed
0:16.3	my earbed and my right ear wasn't working.
0:18.3	It was obvious because on this Beatles tune she'd queued up, Eleanor Rigby, the vocals are almost all on the right-hand side and she couldn't hear him.
0:29.0	It's like that's kind of weird.
0:30.0	So I switched the earbuds and it worked fine.
0:32.0	Wearing the face that she keeps in a... so I switched the earbuds and it worked fine.
0:32.6	Wearing the face that she keeps in a jaw by the door.
0:36.0	But then it was, the other one wasn't working in my right year.
0:39.0	And I was like, what?
0:41.2	Yeah, confusing.
0:43.0	And then she tried getting out of bed.
0:45.0	I was so dizzy.
0:48.0	It was my first time experiencing vertigo,
0:50.0	and it was so severe.
0:52.0	I couldn't walk across the room without getting severely
0:54.6	motion sick. With that vertigo Caitlin could barely walk at all because she had no
0:59.2	sense of balance that actually relies on a mechanism inside our ears.
1:03.0	Later, doctors found she had lost 87% of her hearing on the right side.
	...

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