medical debt

What would a world without medical debt look like? In Germany's former coal-mining region medical debt is almost unknown, despite economic challenges and health problems. Here's why.

Some credit cards advertised by hospitals lure in patients with rosy promises of convenient, low-interest payments on big bills. But interest rates soar if you can't quickly pay off the loan.

New policies to keep medical bills from sinking credit ratings sound good but will likely fall short for many hit hardest by debt — especially Black Americans in the South, such as Penelope Wingard.

Nonprofit RIP Medical Debt buys up unpaid hospital bills plaguing low-income patients and frees them from having to pay.

Medical breakthroughs mean cancer is less likely to kill, but survival can come at an extraordinary cost as patients drain savings, declare bankruptcy or lose their homes, a KHN-NPR investigation finds.

The U.S. health system now produces debt on a mass scale, a new investigation shows. Patients face gut-wrenching sacrifices.

The Biden administration announced new measures to ease the financial burden of high medical bills. Here's how the measures can help and what's still missing to protect patients.

Equifax, Experian and TransUnion said that as of July that they will no longer include such debt on consumer credit reports.

Medical bills are a leading reason people get stuck in a cycle of debt. The nonprofit Upsolve created an app it calls the “TurboTax of bankruptcy” to help people hit reset and rebuild their financial lives.

Patients are often told to be smart consumers and shop around for health care before they use it. But even when you do so, estimates from insurers, hospitals and doctors can be unreliable.