Former nurse exposes how hospitals are only concerned about making money by fleecing patients

The steep healthcare costs in the United States mean you are potentially one bad fall away from going bankrupt. It's becoming normalized for Americans to not seek healthcare for the fear of racking up debt. A former nurse has stated on TikTok that a corrupt hospital system is enabling hospitals to get away with fleecing patients. Christy often shares videos on the healthcare industry on TikTok and spoke about price transparency in one video. She points out hospitals are rarely transparent despite being mandated to and charge inordinate sums from customers. Christy, who's a former nurse of eight years, said she was 'tired of patients being exploited.'

“If you want to know how stupid hospitals think you are, watch this video until the end. If you’ve seen my pricing transparency video, you know that back in January, there was a requirement placed on hospitals that they needed to publish the prices of their common procedures so the public could see. It is almost the end of August, and less than 10% of hospitals are compliant with this,” she said. Christy has close to 365k followers on TikTok. 

She then pulled up a website of a hospital and their reasoning for refusing to reveal their prices. “We haven’t invested our resources into this because it provides something that will only be useful for our competitors. We aren’t in it for them. We are in it for you and believe you deserve to know what’s important,” she readout. Christy also drew a parallel with an auto dealer and asked how stupid it would be if they refused to reveal the price of a car you wanted to buy, by simply stating that they didn't want to reveal their prices to their competitors. She said hospitals not revealing their prices was equal to auto dealers saying, 'buy the car first, and then we'll reveal the price.' 

She also highlighted how hospitals were charging way more than they should. “Patients are going into crippling debt. Medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Yet, nobody is holding these hospitals accountable, and I am tired of it,” said Christy. She wasn't talking about the healthcare workers, but the system than mint money off patients. She also pointed out that those being weighed down by medical debt did have other avenues to seek help.

Christy pointed out most hospitals in America are non-profit, meaning they have charity care programs that help ease the debt of those who cannot afford medical treatment and are under a certain income level. “Most hospitals in the United States are required to have charity care programs. That means they’re required to have programs that either reduce or completely wipe out debt for individuals who make under a certain amount of money,” she said, before adding, "‘Dollar For’ is an organization that will contact your hospital, apply you for their charity program, and then they will follow up with the hospital on your behalf until your debt is reduced or eliminated. And guess what guys, they do it for free.”

Jared Walker, who runs the organization Dollar For, recently shared on TikTok how to legally "crush" medical bills. As we reported, he instructed folks to Google the hospital's name plus the term "financial assistance." Then, log on to their site and look for their Charity Care Policy. Then, based on your gross annual income, you could apply for a medical bill waiver. "Dollar For simply saw a need that no one else was fulfilling and until the healthcare system can support these efforts itself, we’re committed to helping every family we can escape crippling medical bills," reads a description on their website.