He/him

don’t just pay it. do not automatically pay the hospital bill when you receive it. call your health insurance provider and POLITELY say, “excuse me, i just received a bill for $1200 for my hospital visit/ER visit/etc., is that the correct amount i’m supposed to pay?” because hospitals bill you before your health insurance and they will take your money no matter how the amount due may change based on your health insurance looking at it. 90% of the time, if your health insurance is in any way involved in the payment of that bill, you do not have to pay as much as the hospital is billing you for. call your health insurance provider first, and POLITELY request clarification, always remember that the person you are talking to is human and this is just their job, and then you will very likely find out you actually only owe $500.

Also, it is important [for people receiving medical care in the USA] to carefully read all of the items on the medical bill and look for errors and overcharges. I know that the normal feelings of avoidance and dread can make it hard to look at scary hospital bills, and that’s okay! But as the OP mentions, private orgs like hospitals don’t monitor overpayment of bills - they are motivated to charge you extra - and it is basically impossible to get your money back. Read the bill carefully and make sure that the charges are correct, using the links below for help if you need. If they haven’t sent you an itemized list, you can ask for one. Sometimes you will be charged extra for items or treatment you didn’t receive. Most people don’t know that you can dispute medical bills! But in 2009, Consumer Reports stated that 8 out of 10 medical bills scrutinized by a watchdog had errors, and generally you are not obligated to pay for someone else’s error.

You may be charged for using medication that you actually brought into the hospital with you - that’s easy to dispute! You may be charged for the consumables used during your stay such as sheets, gloves, gowns, etc - the hospital should actually cover that under its running budget. You may be charged for a brand name drug if the generic was available for cheaper - the links below explain how and when you can dispute this. You may be charged a surprisingly expensive “oral administration fee” (where a nurse puts pills for you to take in a little clean paper cup and then hands it to you) but that’s worth disputing if you were actually able to take the pill out of a bottle and put it in your own mouth. And so on.

8 Things You Should Know About Challenging a Medical Bill (FORBES) (includes links to sites that help you calculate how much a procedure/treatment usually costs in your area, if the costs seem super high)

7 Tips for Fighting and Paying A Huge Medical Bill (FORBES) This explains briefly how to negotiate costs, and payment plans.

10 Common Medical Billing Overcharges You Can Prevent (Bill Advocates) A breakdown of errors and overcharges to double check.

“Those people should work hard and immigrate the right way.”

You didn’t.  Your daddy nutted in your mama somewhere within the 50 states and here you are, but you want some other person to jump through fifty hoops to get what you were born into? Why? What’s the logic?

“My people have been here for centuries. We’re real Americans.”

What’s that got to do with you? What did you SPECIFICALLY do to deserve being born on American soil? What did an immigrant running from drug cartels or civil war do to deserve being born there?

tumblr could not have changed everything at a worse time for me. I had only just started getting back on my feet, using my side blog to promote a certain side job (sorry, mom). It was going pretty well, I at least made one rent payment… 3 months ago. Because now my hours were cut in the store I work at, because that is the nature of small businesses. 

Now I owe 1,000$ to my landlord, and more to my parents for when they helped me out months ago. 

Please help me out. I’ve run out of places to turn. I’ve picked up side jobs around my city, but it’s not enough. I’m down to one meal a day, two if I can pick up enough bottles for taco bell. i’ve been applying for jobs daily, but it’s the end of the semester in a 75% college city. You do the math. 

I started that side job out of desperation (and a little fun, but mostly desperation). it was the only thing i could do around my weird schedule of activism and classes. 

pulls off paper to reveal “porn bot”

“Boom.”

Staff: “Porn”