Medical bill that was in collection and now has court date

	Maria
	Collections Law
	Medical bill that was in collection and now has court date
	I gave birth October of last year and at the time I did not have insurance. I was able to self pay the hospital and the gynecologist; however, I received a bill for $4100 for attendance, discharge, initial hospital care and audio test for the baby. While at the hospital I did ask on more than one occasion how much the services were going to cost, but I was not given a response as to the amount. The account went to a collection agency and now is schedule for pretrial conference in Miami Dade County Florida on November 24. I was summons as well as my husband; however he has not received any prior bills on his name. I am currently not working and we are not able to pay the full amount at this time. Can they garnish wages from my husband the father of the baby or IRS returns? Who is responsible for the bill, my husband or I, or both? What can we do to remedy the situation?
	click here to enlarge MY RESPONSE I'd say that since it is for your child you are both responsible however since you live in Florida and your husband is the head of household his wages cannot be garnished. He has to qualify for head of household by virtue of filing his taxes as head of household however. No, they can't garnish IRS tax returns until the money hits your bank account by virtue of depositing the check in your bank account. You need to get any and all money out of any bank accounts you may have and if your husband is being paid by electonic payments to your bank he needs to stop that immediately and tell his employer he wants paper checks. After that is done there isn't a lot they can do to get their money unless you go to work. Then they can go after your pay. What can you do to remedy the situation. Of course, you will have to respond to the summons and complaint. If I were sued I would use a special form of graduated denial sworn before notary public. I would also prepare and send a good set of admissions to the plaintiffs attorney when I sent him my response to the complaint. Of course I would file my response with the court first and then send to the attorney by certified mail return receipt requested. If the summons and complaint were the first contact the attorney had made with me I would also include a good validation damand letter. Then I would just sit back and wait for their response to all of that. I would count on the fact that no matter what I did in the local court I would lose and they would get a judgment. The reason that is true is because when we get to court the judge already knows that I owe the debt because if I didn't the plaintiff probably wouldn't be there complaining therefore it is a foregone conclusion that I owe the debt. Therefore if I want to prevail I must do something to turn the table on the plaintiff and the only way to do that is to catch the lawyer violating the law and sue the lawyer in federal court. Lawyers almost routinely violate federal law and it is up to me to know what the law says he must do or must not do so I can catch him in the act and document his violations. There are a great many ways they can violate. For instance, if the process server came to your door and handed you the summons then the summons was the attorney's initial contact with you so long as they had not contacted you previously. Whatever their initial contact might have been I would carefully document that and use a validation demand. Assuming that the initial contact was that summons and I responded with my denial and included my demand letter then the attorney cannot move forward with any continued collection activity until the demand for validation was complied with. That means that the attorney can't respond to my demand for admissions until the demand for validation has been met. Since there is a time limit within which he must respond to the admissions request he is now between a rock and a hard place. Most likely he will violate by responding to the admissions without having provided the required documentation. There are several other ways they can violate and so when we get to federal court the only question before that court is whether or not the attorney violated the law and if I have the proof that they did then there is no way they can win just as there is no way I can win in local court. Basically, that is the way I would go at it. I would not need to hire an attorney either for local court or federal court. I know how to handle all of that even though I am not an attorney. I teach people, including consumer protection attorneys how to do all of that. So far my students have won a total of 172 federal lawsuits with never a loss. So now that you know all of that what will you do?