My mom had to take an ambulance to the hospital a few years ago. She later got a bill for $2800 although medicare paid for some of that. Turns out the hospital she went to had its own associated ambulance service which wasn’t the ambulance service that gave her the ride. She later got a second bill from the hospital’s ambulance service, also for $2800, even though they hadn’t even given her the ride (medicare naturally enough did not pay for any of this bill). My mom was going to pay this second bill because I guess her generation just pays every fucking bill that shows up in the mail no matter what, but I put my foot down and insisted that she didn’t. I had a lot of fun calling them up and yelling at them about this bullshit. They refused to retract the bill and sent it a few more times, but eventually they gave up and didn’t send it to collections.

A fun side note to this story is that the hospital system in question became in danger of bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. A vulture capitalist firm noticed that the value of just the hospital system’s real estate holdings was a lot more than the sale price, so they purchased it and ran up a ton more debt paying themselves more than a billion dollars in bonuses. Then they spun off the real estate as a separate entity to which the hospitals started paying rent, which increased their operating deficit and debt still further. Eventually the hospitals declared bankruptcy and were closed down, leaving an entire city (of poor black people, natch) without any hospitals at all. Capitalism is just so awesome.