Will Bankruptcy Take Care of My Medical Debt? Anyone who has experienced an unforeseen medical problem knows that the medical bills can be insurmountable. This is especially hard if you’re just barely covering your current monthly expenses. If you then add thousands of dollars in medical debt, it becomes impossible. This is one of the most common reasons for a person to consider bankruptcy. Those medical debts left unpaid ….
could eventually result in a legal judgment against you and then turn into a garnishment. That’s the last thing you need. However, filing a bankruptcy will protect you and, in most cased, will erase your medical debt.
Joint Medical Debt
If you file a bankruptcy but your spouse doesn’t file with you, then your spouse will still be responsible for any medical debt that and your spouse got while you were married. If you got a medical bill on your own while you were married, even if your spouse had nothing to do with it, your spouse still might have to pay the bill because Utah law says that each spouse is responsible for the other spouse’s medical debts that were acquired while married. Additionally, if you have kids, each parent is responsible for a minor child’s medical debt. It doesn’t matter whether or not the non-filing spouse was present at the time the medical debt was incurred, or agreed to it. For example, if a husband goes to the doctor without telling the wife, the wife is still responsible for the debt. Of course, if both spouses file a bankruptcy then the medical debt could no longer be collected by either of the spouses. For this reason, if you’re trying to decide whether your spouse should file bankruptcy with you, one of the considerations should be how much medical debt you have that fits in the above scenarios.