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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Not that I question the unsourced anecdotes of the God account, but I'd be genuinely curious to see a business that thought an astronomical legal bill would be worth garnishing the wages of a service sector worker.
As someone with family in the legal profession and the medical billing profession, it's crazy to think of the cost-benefit of pursuing this kind of claim given the return expected. Hospitals write off millions a year in "bad debt", because collection is consistently more expensive than the real value of these claims.
Can hospitals still sell their debts to third party collection agencies? Those groups seem like exactly the type to garnish McD wages.
Collection agencies will buy hospital debt at pennies on the dollar. And then collection agencies can try to annoy you into paying. But they have an even weaker claim on your debt than the original hospital. Getting a court to agree to garnish wages is a drawn out process. And it can be easily circumvented if you quit your job and take up employment somewhere else. In the service sector, that happens so routinely as to make wage garnishment a fool's errand.
I've had my wages garnished from an ambulance trip. 18Y/o me was insanely confused when HR pulled me aside to let me know.
They ended up only getting a few hundred Bucks, how could that possibly have been worth it for them? In any case if they would do that to me it wouldnt surprise me to hear they do it to others as well.
John Oliver bought a bunch to forgive if I remember correctly.
My brother in law had a medical bill that was supposed to be covered by insurance, but they didn't pay. (A small-ish bill of a few thousand dollars) His bill was sent to collections, and they hounded him for years, despite him having in writing that the insurance and hospital both agreed that the insurance was supposed to cover it. After 8 years, they started garnishing his wages. This is when he decided to get a lawyer involved, and he was able to successfully sue the hospital for garnishing wages illegally. The hospital had to pay out 30K.
All that to say, hospitals aren't always acting intelligently or legally.
How did they garnish his wages without having a court involved? They would had to have sued him already in court.
I think he was served papers at one point around the 3-4 year mark, but just told the hospital he wasn't going to pay since they already had agreed in writing he didn't have to pay. He never went to court. I don't know the exact process, it was never explained to my brother in law, but given they had a valid, unpaid bill of 8 years (and multiple attempts to get him to pay on record) was enough?
Yeah, that's a default judgement then. If you're served, you need to respond, or else the judge declares in favor of the plaintiff.
They send it to collections, collections hands it off to a lawyer who files in court, court sends a beer date, person can't afford to take off for the day, so court issues a default judgment.
The system does not care about one's circumstances if one is too poor to advocate for themselves.
Add a dash of depression, anxiety and stress and this is a very believable scenario for anyone who is even of adequate means.
Lawyer sends the collections agency a bill for 10x the collections amount.