Emergency Physicians Integrated Care EPIC Uncooperative, non-caring, greedy, stubborn, unwilling to help with financial hardship Salt Lake City, Utah

Nobody likes taking their daughter to the Emergency Room.  The experience is often unpleasant with long lines, long wait times and sub-par medical service.  Then if you are lucky enough to live in the United States of America, you get another nasty surprise a few weeks later, the medical bills.  I was billed $1947 for the Emergency room visit and $486 for the doctor bill.  That is $2433 for sub-par service and for a fairly unpleasant experience.  The actual time with the nurses and doctors was less than a 1/2 hour.  To make matters worse our combined family income is less than $40k per year, so paying such a bill in full is just not possible.

We have run into financial hardships in the past with other hospitals and they were more than willing to help us pay the bill by settling for less than what we owed or by pointing us to outside resources or financial hardship programs. [continued below]....

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Unfortunately, this time we had the misfortune of having to deal with "Emergency Physicians Integrated Care, LLC" or EPIC. They are a third party billing company that is billing us $486.00 for the physician bill.  We have tried to get payment assistance to pay our medical bill and they are not willing to help at all.  They tell us we don't qualify for financial assistance, and that there are no hardship programs available.  I even tried offering a lump sum settlement of $292.00 which is 60% of the total debt and the supervisor at EPIC told me "we will only accept payment in full and if you don't pay we will refer your account to a collection agency."  I explained to her that a collection agency would purchase the debt for only 10 to 20%, and believe it or not, she told me that they would rather sell the debt to a collection agency for $50 or $100 than let me settle for $292.00.  So from what I understand, EPIC would rather take greater loss so their buddies at the collection agency can get their piece of the pie.

My experience in trying to work with EPIC to settle this debt has been a nightmare.  They are unprofessional, and they are not interested in working with people who have a legitimate financial hardship.  It is quite evident that they would rather make sure that person's credit is ruined rather than help them pay the bill even if it's only part of the bill.