From our experience with personal injury cases we are very aware that most hospital bills are grossly inflated and that hospitals routinely accept as full payment hugely discounted amounts. For example, it is not uncommon for a hospital to accept as full payment 20% or even 10% of the bill for an in-patient hospital visit.
I once asked an orthopedic surgeon if his charges to repair a broken ankle were customary and reasonable. (A yes answer is required to get the bills into evidence in a lawsuit involving the injury.) The surgeon replied with unusual but unhelpful candor, "I bill as much as I can and accept whatever the insurance company pays."
In my experience most doctors are quite reasonable in adjusting the bill for an uninsured patient down to what they usually get paid by insurance companies or close to that. (It helps if the patient pays in advance or the doctor expect to be paid promptly in full by the patient.)
Unfortunately, hospitals generally try hard to get paid a lot more by uninsured patients than they get paid by insured patients. Even if they offer a discount for lack of insurance, the discount is likely to be far less than the discount given insurance companies. Hospitals argue that they are taking a big risk of not getting paid when they treat uninsured people and that this justifies them in charging a lot more to uninsured patients. On the other hand, just because a hospital says a stay is worth $25,000 doesn't make it true. If a patient is taken to a hospital in an emergency the patient has no opportunity to discuss in advance the hospital charges and the hospital should not be able to just make up whatever bill it feels like.
It is true that many or most uninsured patients never pay their hospital bills.
However, if you are one of the very few uninsured patients who can afford to pay a reasonable in-patient hospital bill and need help getting the bill cut down to what insurance companies typically pay for such a stay give us a call to discuss how we can help.
For such cases we would work either on an hourly rate or on a flat fee based on results. However, for such cases, in contrast to our PI cases, we require payment up-front. (If the fee is based on results, we would require a deposit into our trust account which would be refunded if we did not get the agreed upon results or which would be paid out to us if we did get the agreed upon results.)
We do not offer this service of fighting medical bills for emergency room visits or for most doctor charges.
If we are handling a personal injury case for you we are sometimes able to reduce medical bills, including doctor bills, and this service is included within the contingency fee for the personal injury case.