Wage garnishment is when a court order requires an employer to withhold a person’s earnings to pay off a debt. In health care settings, this occurs when lawyers obtain court orders for a health care provider client, such as a hospital, surgery center or physician group, to garnish the wages and savings of patients who could not afford to pay their hospital bills, according to this report, “Medical Debt Ecosystem — The mechanized wealth extraction from America’s patients.”
For the report, researchers documented the widespread use of court orders that lawyers submitted on behalf of hospitals to large employers and banks to extract wages and savings from the hospitals’ low-income employees and patients who could not pay their bills.