Quote:I went for an eye appointment.  Basically they did nothing for me except say I dont need glasses.  Ok.  I asked how much I owed before I left, they said nothing.  Then later on I get billed $75.  I can see they already billed my insurance about $125.  I'm refusing to pay it.  I haven't paid it in over a year.  I'll be damned if they get paid $200 for doing nothing.

 

What are they going to do?  Take me to court over 100$?

They'll send it to a collections agency, which will contact you constantly to demand payment. They won't take you to court over $75, and probably won't try to claim anything at all against you because the dollar amount is so low, but they will report you after 30 days to all three credit bureaus as having a delinquent account. That could ding as many as 125 points off of your credit score if you let it sit there, and despite what the collectors will tell you as they coerce you into paying it off, that hit will not go away for seven years.

 

Collections is a great business to be in if you have no soul. They "buy" delinquent accounts at 10-15 cents on the dollar, transferring ownership of that debt to themselves, then keep anything and everything they collect. They're good at collecting, too, and they're a slimy bunch. Most of what they say and do is a legally gray area--for instance, they're allowed to tell you that paying off part of the debt will help your credit score, even though they know that it'll just lessen the blow of their reporting your account by a small margin--and there's not a ton of policing. If you agree to pay off 50% of the debt, the agency you pay it to might turn around and sell the remaining debt to another agency, then on and on down the line. Some of those agencies will, very illegally, demand payment on more of the debt than actually remains outstanding, sometimes as much as 100% of your original debt. They won't tell you that they've purchased your debt from another agency, but they will tell you that because you made a partial settlement only, they're entitled to collect the remaining money, and can report you to the credit bureaus again for the "new" debt (not true).

 

Basically, yeah, don't screw with collections agencies if you don't absolutely have to. The $75 you owe to the optometrist is not worth the time, energy and misery that will go into dealing with those sleazeballs.

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