These Influencers Are on a Mission to Stop People From Paying Medical Bills

As costs to patients explode, so do social-media posts suggesting people think twice about paying high bills.

Ian Howard was shocked to get a $1,000 bill for a brief visit to the emergency room that determined he sprained his ankle in a fall last year. Instead of fighting the bill, he just didn’t pay it.

“I went in for a sprained ankle. All’s they did was look at it and say, the bitch is sprained” the 28-year-old yells in a rant on TikTok. “Y’all ain’t never seeing that money!”

The 24-second video has racked up more than

Erika Kullberg, known for dispensing general consumer advice on social media, has more recently focused on tips on dealing with high medical bills.

Unpaid bills are a real pain point for hospitals. Patient debt and the cost of charity care rose 16% in the first half of the year, versus the year-ago period, according to Vizient’s KaufmanHall unit. “As pressure from these trends mounts, hospitals may need to redesign their financial and operational strategies,” the report said. Social media is brimming with content from people like Howard who say they won’t pay high bills and advise others to not pay them, or who share tips on how to cut their bills. In just the last three months, there have been more than 426,000 mentions across X, Bluesky, YouTube and Reddit of medical bills, advice not to pay them, tips on negotiating bills lower, and related topics, according to Sprout Social, a social-media intelligence firm. That is a 36,000% increase over the 1,163 mentions in the same period a year ago, the firm found.

The social-media movement is just one more reason hospitals are having a tough time collecting out-of-pocket payments from patients.

“Any kind of negative perception is always concerning,” said Rick Gundling, a senior vice president with the Healthcare Finance Management Association, a professional organization for healthcare provider finance officials. “Hospitals would want to make sure patients and the community know they can have conversations with the hospital.”

A popular subgenre of the social-media posts are new mothers discussing their hefty birth bills. Influencer Lina Huffman posted a TikTok video that starts with the graphic: “PSA: DO NOT PAY THE HOSPITAL BILL UNTIL YOU’VE DONE THIS.”

Standing in front of a crib with her baby in a sling, she gives tips to new mothers who have gotten bills for hospital deliveries. “They make it so complicated to confuse you but you’re going to be smarter than them,” Huffman says. She advises people to ask for itemized bills, look for errors and duplicated charges that can be corrected.

She also tells people to ask the hospital for discounts, including for paying in full over the phone: “I know this because I did this for my first baby, and this is my second, and I just got my $1,500 bill to $1,100. It only took me 10 minutes to do it. That is $400 of free money I can now spend on my morning coffee.” The video got about 274,000 views, and others she has posted on the topic have gotten more than one million.

Huffman said some people responded to her video saying they simply don’t pay medical bills. “While I understand feeling overwhelmed by the cost, I believe it’s better to address medical debt than ignore it,” she said. “I wanted to share practical ways to reduce or negotiate medical bills for other moms.”

Medical debt below $500 no longer affects credit scores under voluntary policies adopted by major credit-report agencies, and some states have enacted laws seeking to ban or restrict medical debt affecting credit scores.

Lauren Meadows, whose videos about motherhood have earned her 256,000 followers on TikTok, has posted several about medical debt she incurred from baby deliveries and hospital stays. In one, she said the hospital sent her bill to a debt collector five months after the birth. She called the collection agency, which told her she could get a 25% discount to satisfy the debt.

“I guess the moral of the story is let your medical bills go to a debt collector, ‘cause then they’ll cut it down,” she says. In another video from last year, she cries when she discovers that $9,000 had been cut from her balance, so that she “only” owed $6,700. “Oh my gosh, this is such a relief,” she says.

Andrew Gordon, who writes for the Marshall Allen Project newsletter, which offers tips on how people can reduce their healthcare expenses, said the social-media trend reflected the pent-up frustration with the existing system. “It’s a desire to want to figure out and use the collective knowledge of the public to figure out how they can fight back,” he said.

Even personal-finance influencers with big followings are getting in on the game.

Erika Kullberg, a 36-year-old lawyer in New York, gained a big social-media following about five years ago when she began posting tips on TikTok about how to get a replacement for damaged Nikes or how to get paid by airlines for lost luggage.

She began to get messages from her followers asking for tips on dealing with high medical bills. So she hired some billing experts to learn how patients could save and began posting tips. One follower told her that she was able to cut her hospital bills by nearly 50% as a result of what Kullberg had shared.

Her top tips include: When you get a bill, don’t pay until you ask the hospital for an itemized bill. Scan it for mistakes and duplicate charges and ask the hospital to remove incorrect charges. Get an explanation of benefits from your insurer and make sure they are paying for what they are supposed to cover. And ask the hospital whether you are eligible for a financial-assistance program.

Kullberg uses props and costumes and plays all the roles in her videos. In one, she holds up a finger covered in red marker to look like blood, pretending to be a patient who asks how much stitches will cost, and is later shocked by the bill. She said she recently ordered a nurse’s outfit for a future post.

Write to Peter Loftus at Peter.Loftus@wsj.com