Bad Debt Is the Pain Hospitals Can't Heal as Patients Don't Pay

Bad Debt Is the Pain Hospitals Can't Heal as Patients Don't Pay-bloomberg: A type of pain that hospitals thought they had relieved has come back with a vengeance: it’s called bad debt. Hospitals have long struggled to collect bills when patients aren’t covered by insurance -- creating delinquent accounts. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to relieve some of that strain by helping pay for coverage for millions of Americans and expanding Medicaid in some states to cover the poor.