> But lawsuits are a rich man's game. She couldn't justify trying to find an attorney or fighting a big, publicly traded company that would pursue her for $2,700.
This makes no sense and calls into question whether the article is being honest in its description of the debt in question. No superior court would waste its time over $2,700 - that's small claims territory, eg. no lawyers or fees for defendants.
In general if you owe a debt to a company that gets acquired the debt doesn't just disappear. A bunch of fluff about the pandemic doesn't change that either. So my take is that the lede is disingenuous and the piece smells like agenda-pushing.
If you get served with a small claims lawsuit it is clearly labeled as such. And most small claims jurisdictions have no-cost mediation options to help people understand wtf is going on.
The threat of a lawsuit is not a lawsuit, it is instead a demand letter that will state that if you do not pay, you will be sued. It will not say in sued in small claims, it just says you will be sued.
So you would not get served to appear at a small claims court office, you will instead get a very scary letter on a law office's letter head, and you will pay the money.
You know this, as do I. You are assuming everyone else knows it too, and knows enough to say 'eat my shorts, file a small claim or GTFO.'
It's not the job of journalists to educate folk in this position, though a good journalist would point out such relevant facts to assist readers of the article who might be in a similar position nor or later. The primary job of the journalist is to report on the situation of their story subject, which might include a lack of financial or legal literacy.
The court doesn't waste it's time; the company does.
Furthermore, these sorts of bulk lawsuits can be used as scare tactics to scare up settlements. Obviously, prosecuting a lawsuit over a $2,700 debt makes no financial sense if you were to carry the lawsuit to completion. But it also makes no sense to defend against. Just settle. The vast majority of people do this and thus you can get lots of money by suing people this way.
Indeed, they basically outright stated this:
"As of January, the company has decided to take patients to court only if they make at least twice the federal poverty level — or about $52,000 annually for a family of four."
In other words, they target people who are most likely to settle and pay up.
(Bonus points: this is intended to sound exonerating, until you realize that there is no such thing as a "federal poverty level". $52,000 is dirt poor in New York City or San Francisco.)
>In other words, they target people who are most likely to settle and pay up.
Seems like they can't win. If they sue everyone then they're called out for "suing the poor" or whatever. If they sue only people above an arbitrary cut-off then they're called out for "target[ing] people who are most likely to settle and pay up".
They file suit hoping to get a no show default judgement, and then file to garnish either wages or bank accounts. Most don’t contest so it’s only filing fees on the plaintiff
In my state and I assume many others the plaintiff can choose whether to file in small claims or the normal general district court. The defendant can file to have a case moved from small claims to general district but not the other way around. Judges also do not have the ability to move a case from small claims to the normal general district process unless the parties agree. Companies therefore usually file using the normal general district process in other to achieve the very result documented in this article.
Are there other countries where a person might be responsible for their own bills? I think there are, right? This may be a bit of a silly question, but how do the systems in those countries collect from individuals who will not otherwise pay?
The same way America handles it when eventually enough people don't pay. They bail the companies out with a ton of tax payer money so the companies can continue their practices.
To be fair America has the Veterans Affairs administration, which is socialized medicine, albeit for a small subset of the population, veterans.
If you recall from Donald Trump's presidency, one of the things he campaigned on for veterans, is the ability to choose your own healthcare, such that they wouldn't be locked into the veterans affairs medical system, which was found to be far insufficient.
This isn't an apples to apples but it's worth considering that there are examples of the alternative model not working in America either.
> To be fair America has the Veterans Affairs administration, which is socialized medicine, albeit for a small subset of the population, veterans.
It also has TriCare (military & dependents, ~10M), Medicare (Aged/Disabled, 61.2M in 2020), and Medicaid (medically indigent, 68M in 2020). With around 9M in Veteran Health Administration, the US has socialized medicine for nearly 150M people out of the 330M population.
This lists 20% of Medicare and 15% of Medicaid enrolled are dual eligible. So that's somewhere between 10.2 and 12.2 million lower, using your numbers.
(And yes, those numbers are obviously off somewhere, since the two should match. But it's good enough and I'm not sure it's even possible to track down the actual numbers used in the given link.)
> one of the things he campaigned on for veterans, is the ability to choose your own healthcare
Veterans can already do that.
> such that they wouldn't be locked into the veterans affairs medical system, which was found to be far insufficient.
They aren't locked into the VA, and whether or not the VA is sufficient depends on who you ask.
Veterans already have the choice of choosing their own healthcare or using the VA. If the VA is considered insufficient, but they're using it anyways, then that means that their other choices are even worse.
Don't be fooled. Republicans want to gut the VA as a way to cut spending so they can give the rich even more tax cuts. They will happily do this at the cost of healthcare for veterans while framing it as expanding freedom by giving them a choice that they already had.
Dangerously ill-informed comment. Have you ever been to a hospital in a country that embraced socialism? In some countries you pay effectively zero for socialized healthcare. What an awesome, marketable for votes delusion.
Guess what. You get exactly what you paid for. Chronic mismanagement, apathy, deteriorating conditions, lack of resources. Need to schedule a procedure? Get into a virtual line 10000 persons long. "Oh you are in pain? I'm sorry. Thermometers are the only medication we can offer". In CIS countries, the only way to get something done is to bribe an official (to move you up the line by a 100 or so) or a private clinic (but socialism is so great! right?) If a country with socialized healthcare manages float it's healthcare services on an "average" (aka meh) level, it's only because of the private donors, private insurances, private donations, and financial aid and subsidies from US (but capitalism is so awful, right??)
Grass is always greener aka you have no idea what you are talking about
I have - I had an emergency procedure done within hours, without noticing particular mismanagement, apathy, deteriorating conditions, or lack of resources.
It was annoying that they didn't want to give out narcotic painkillers, but given addiction rates here, understandable. Not a question of resources, just a different approach.
Of course, as a foreigner who was going to have to pay cash, I can't be positive that the experience would be the same for citizens on Taiwan's national plan, but the people I was staying with said I was being treated the same as they'd seen anyone else...
In many social democratic countries citizens will only pay a small fixed fee for necessary operations. For private bills, or if your travel-insurance doesn't cover medical bills in other countries, you could still get stuck with a hefty bill.
In most cases, you pay peanuts and people get their health back so they can go back to work and live life as before.
The problem is that Hospitals can charge any amount they feel is correct but you cannot find that out UNTIL AFTER the service is delivered. Yes you could ask for cash prices but try doing that at a regular hospital and see how quickly you get them in a clear and concise manner.
I'm replying to you because you're the top comment, but this is a general response, because I feel like many replies have misconstrued my meaning.
I am not asking what happens in countries with socialized healthcare. I'm also not asking what are the flaws of private healthcare. I am only asking, supposing that there are other countries where there is private healthcare, how those countries deal with nonpayment. If there are no other such countries the question is moot but I had been led to believe that there are some.
In my country, without insurance you will usually be required to place cash deposit before the hospital approves any expensive treatment. If you don't have any money for the deposit, you will need to secure financial assistant somewhere else first (government assistance, charity, etc). This limit hospital's risk, but put extra pressure to patients. Luckily healthcare cost is relatively cheaper here.
And then what? They send it to some collection agency, who sends you letters reminding you over 2-3 years...and..if the amount is a couple of hundred€ drop the matter...it'd cost them more to pursue it further...
If you are in Caribbean country for example, and get services, if you don't pay you will literally not be allowed to leave the country until you settle up.
Generally the costs are fractions of what they are in the US. But they are not playing - they don't have confidence that once you are back in US or wherever that you'll pay.
Some countries even have exit fees etc. You are there until you pay to leave.
Yeah - they "arrested" the vessel I was on once until someone's medical bill was settled up (not mine). Certainly worked, company involved wired money promptly.
The other thing - you can be turned away for lack of payment more easily (or just not get great care) in other countries. In the US you can do a $10M bill on critical care at a hospital without paying anything - that just doesn't happen in some other countries in most cases - they don't have the $10M lying around etc or have more competing needs so you just can't stay on full support for years the way you might in US.
In most other countries, that same level of critical care would not even come close to $10M. The sticker price of healthcare in the US is so wildly inflated as to be meaningless.
Other countries don't come close to keeping people alive as long as folks try in the US.
New Jersey for example allows for a religious objection to a medical declaration of brain death etc. As long as your heart keeps pumping you can be called alive and provided with intensive care (for years). And yes, your heart pumping can be mechanically driven, they can do feeding tubes and IV's etc - so this means "alive" for a very long time.
We need to be clear - that other countries will not provide govt or mandatory care in these types of cases.
In places like New Jersey - it is a crime to stop providing care (even when person is fully brain dead) or to stop paying for care if someone has a religious belief someone is alive.
“No health care practitioner or other health care provider, and no health service plan, insurer, or governmental authority, shall deny coverage or exclude from the benefits of service any individual solely because of that individual’s personal religious beliefs regarding the application of neurological criteria for declaring death.”
You can imagine the costs of these types of laws.
There is a small industry in places like California which cap malpractice awards in cases of death but don't if someone is alive to get folks to new jersey where they can be kept "alive" indefinitely to maximum legal payouts etc.
Looking into the human rights campaigns about this from Chatham House we have
"• In some parts of the world it is common practice for patients to be detained in hospital
for non-payment of healthcare bills.
• Such detentions occur in public as well as private medical facilities, and there appears
to be wide societal acceptance in certain countries of the assumed right of health providers
to imprison vulnerable people in this way.
• The true scale of these hospital detention practices, or ‘medical detentions’, is unknown, but
the limited academic research to date suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are likely
to be affected every year....
Women
requiring life-saving emergency caesarean sections, and their babies, are particularly vulnerable
to detention in medical facilities."
Yeah the grand irony of comments like this is that it is a brand of thinking that is actually very characteristic of a specific group of Americans who blindly view the rest of the world as some utopia(and they are mostly just equating Europe with the rest of the world here) and America as this embodiment of everything terrible. So you get to seem worldly while in my mind projecting a very limited view of the realities of the broader world.
Slate Star Codex (Astral Codex Ten now) has an amazing piece on the sociology and psychology of the phenomenon of "Blue/Left American's" who enjoying trash talking America where he points out that these people who make an identity out of trash talking "America" as well as things like white men who write articles about "how terrible white men are" are not being self critical because those terms in this context are a code word for "Red/Right America" who are stereotypically more openly patriotic.
So it creates this great rhetorical tool of getting to seem humble and self critical on the surface while everyone knows you are really just complaining about the other side.
Truly one of my favorite things I have ever read. Put words on so many things that I felt but struggled to articulate.
Worth pointing out that I don't identify with conservative or right politics. I know because I'm critiquing one side here but it's not an indication of me being on the other side. I just find it to be an interesting point that matches my lived experience.
It is not well-known that some large insurance companies have a specific tactic that they employ against out-of-network medical groups even for pre-approved or emergency work (Some practices that are out-of-network will charge exponential multiples for services which is another grievious issue).
The large insurer will send checks for goods & services directly to the patient, rather than to the practice(s) that performed the service, even if this is a fairly reasonable cost.
Patients see a check for $8,000 and $25,000 that is supposed to go to the trauma surgeon's practice that initially stabilized the patient, followed by the Plastic Surgeon's practice that spent 16 hours, 2 titanium plates, and a large number of titanium screws, and biologic implants reconstructing the patient's face. And, similar for the small consults $300 consults to Opthamology and Neurology that are common to severe head trauma involving optic nerves, relatively minor brain injures and significant facial trauma.
Instead of providing it to the practice to pay for the plates/screws, and delivered services, the patient spends the money. Then the patient gets sued.
This is not uncommon unfortunately - even for medical practices that TRY to be in-network with every single insurer, AND medicare/medicaid.
I reread this twice, but I am still not sure how this helps the insurance company through. Is there something I missed? Or is this intend to cause administrative issues for out-of-network medical groups?
It puts the insurance company in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiations, and it severely hampers the administrative side of medical practice performing the services, because they are in the awkward position of having to sue a patient, or put liens/garnishments against a patient's income/house. Insurance companies may not be at all helpful in this process either.
i used the work in the substance abuse treatment space, where it's even more impactful. People with addictions go to treatment for 30-45 days, and when they get home, they have a $30k check to pay for the treatment. Same deal - insurance pays the individual who pays the center.
But I could not imagine a worse recipient, in terms of responsibility, than a recently recovered addict.
Because they generally get their money, and because that's kinda how insurance works. It also may not have been obvious which situation would arise when they did the admission. Additionally, many places charge $5-10k directly and then bill insurance to the max they can - even if they can't always collect the check sent to the patient, it's still profitable. (IIRC, cost to admit a patient was $7-11k/month at the facilities we saw.)
It still does not make any sense to me that a business would continue engaging with another business that is causing them to lose money. If a business is getting ripped off, then they need to ask for cash up front, or have contracts requiring direct payment.
But if they are going to continue willingly engaging with a party that jerks them around, I do not see who they have to blame but themselves.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting the facilities are getting ripped off. In reddit terms, Everyone Sucks Here. Facilities use every shady tactic to get people in the door, so nobody should shed a tear for them.
My overall answer is that companies that bill insurance live in a complex world. Insurance tries to dodge payouts and will pay the insured; the facilities try to jam billing.
Perhaps an anecdote will be representative: I worked for one of the biggest providers, with dozens of facilities. They had a call center whose job it was to get insurance to approve another 3 days of treatment (30 day stay = 10 of these calls). Insurance companies don't staff their end, so the call centers were paying people to wait on the line for several hours, just to get treatment approved. (I ended up building a Twilio integration to queue up without a person on the phone.)
This is just a shitty, awful area of medicine and business and insurance.
The article makes no mention of the legal justification backing up any of these debts. They aren't due to straightforward contracts like nearly every other bill, as that would require up-front rates. And so they must be due to some state law that empowers hospitals to create arbitrary post-facto charges for whatever amounts they feel like. Part of the focus of healthcare reform needs to be on these state laws that enable the arbitrary billing racket in the first place - if they were eliminated, much of the opaqueness of the healthcare industry would be forced to change.
I don't understand your assertion. Were stimulus payments instituted to indirectly pay the companies that own hospitals? Will any further stimulus payments be issued with the same motivation?
> Were stimulus payments instituted to indirectly pay the companies that own hospitals?
No. But someone noticed stimulus payments were coming, looked up the debtors who owed amounts close to the stimulus amount and sent off aides to harass those people into turning over the money.
This is exactly what happened, due to a deficiency in statute.
> Under the bill governing the second stimulus check, your funds could not be garnished to pay debts like child support, banks or private creditors. However, part of this rule changed with the third check.
> The bill authorizing the third payout was pushed through using a process called budget reconciliation. Congressional Democrats used this legislative tool to more quickly pass the new COVID-19 relief bill and the third stimulus check that comes with it, since it allowed them to pass it with fewer votes. But because this process was used, the third checks aren't protected from all garnishment, although lawmakers are moving to fix this now.
59 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 44.5 ms ] threadThis makes no sense and calls into question whether the article is being honest in its description of the debt in question. No superior court would waste its time over $2,700 - that's small claims territory, eg. no lawyers or fees for defendants.
In general if you owe a debt to a company that gets acquired the debt doesn't just disappear. A bunch of fluff about the pandemic doesn't change that either. So my take is that the lede is disingenuous and the piece smells like agenda-pushing.
So you would not get served to appear at a small claims court office, you will instead get a very scary letter on a law office's letter head, and you will pay the money.
It's not the job of journalists to educate folk in this position, though a good journalist would point out such relevant facts to assist readers of the article who might be in a similar position nor or later. The primary job of the journalist is to report on the situation of their story subject, which might include a lack of financial or legal literacy.
Furthermore, these sorts of bulk lawsuits can be used as scare tactics to scare up settlements. Obviously, prosecuting a lawsuit over a $2,700 debt makes no financial sense if you were to carry the lawsuit to completion. But it also makes no sense to defend against. Just settle. The vast majority of people do this and thus you can get lots of money by suing people this way.
Indeed, they basically outright stated this:
"As of January, the company has decided to take patients to court only if they make at least twice the federal poverty level — or about $52,000 annually for a family of four."
In other words, they target people who are most likely to settle and pay up.
(Bonus points: this is intended to sound exonerating, until you realize that there is no such thing as a "federal poverty level". $52,000 is dirt poor in New York City or San Francisco.)
Seems like they can't win. If they sue everyone then they're called out for "suing the poor" or whatever. If they sue only people above an arbitrary cut-off then they're called out for "target[ing] people who are most likely to settle and pay up".
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/povert...
https://www.columbiadailyherald.com/news/20191121/medical-de...
But we can't have that in America, because half the country is convinced that would be SOCIALISM!!
If you recall from Donald Trump's presidency, one of the things he campaigned on for veterans, is the ability to choose your own healthcare, such that they wouldn't be locked into the veterans affairs medical system, which was found to be far insufficient.
This isn't an apples to apples but it's worth considering that there are examples of the alternative model not working in America either.
It also has TriCare (military & dependents, ~10M), Medicare (Aged/Disabled, 61.2M in 2020), and Medicaid (medically indigent, 68M in 2020). With around 9M in Veteran Health Administration, the US has socialized medicine for nearly 150M people out of the 330M population.
(PDF WARNING) https://www.cms.gov/Medicare-Medicaid-Coordination/Medicare-...
This lists 20% of Medicare and 15% of Medicaid enrolled are dual eligible. So that's somewhere between 10.2 and 12.2 million lower, using your numbers.
(And yes, those numbers are obviously off somewhere, since the two should match. But it's good enough and I'm not sure it's even possible to track down the actual numbers used in the given link.)
Good call. Forgot to consider dual eligibles; which drops it closer to 1/3 the population than half with socialized medicine.
My understanding is that that the veterans' choice private options would still have been payed for by the VA.
https://www.va.gov/COMMUNITYCARE/providers/index.asp https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpomete...
Veterans can already do that.
> such that they wouldn't be locked into the veterans affairs medical system, which was found to be far insufficient.
They aren't locked into the VA, and whether or not the VA is sufficient depends on who you ask.
Veterans already have the choice of choosing their own healthcare or using the VA. If the VA is considered insufficient, but they're using it anyways, then that means that their other choices are even worse.
Don't be fooled. Republicans want to gut the VA as a way to cut spending so they can give the rich even more tax cuts. They will happily do this at the cost of healthcare for veterans while framing it as expanding freedom by giving them a choice that they already had.
Guess what. You get exactly what you paid for. Chronic mismanagement, apathy, deteriorating conditions, lack of resources. Need to schedule a procedure? Get into a virtual line 10000 persons long. "Oh you are in pain? I'm sorry. Thermometers are the only medication we can offer". In CIS countries, the only way to get something done is to bribe an official (to move you up the line by a 100 or so) or a private clinic (but socialism is so great! right?) If a country with socialized healthcare manages float it's healthcare services on an "average" (aka meh) level, it's only because of the private donors, private insurances, private donations, and financial aid and subsidies from US (but capitalism is so awful, right??)
Grass is always greener aka you have no idea what you are talking about
Having to pay out of pocket after paying 50%+ tax rate! Incredible!
It was annoying that they didn't want to give out narcotic painkillers, but given addiction rates here, understandable. Not a question of resources, just a different approach.
Of course, as a foreigner who was going to have to pay cash, I can't be positive that the experience would be the same for citizens on Taiwan's national plan, but the people I was staying with said I was being treated the same as they'd seen anyone else...
In most cases, you pay peanuts and people get their health back so they can go back to work and live life as before.
The problem is that Hospitals can charge any amount they feel is correct but you cannot find that out UNTIL AFTER the service is delivered. Yes you could ask for cash prices but try doing that at a regular hospital and see how quickly you get them in a clear and concise manner.
I am not asking what happens in countries with socialized healthcare. I'm also not asking what are the flaws of private healthcare. I am only asking, supposing that there are other countries where there is private healthcare, how those countries deal with nonpayment. If there are no other such countries the question is moot but I had been led to believe that there are some.
If you are in Caribbean country for example, and get services, if you don't pay you will literally not be allowed to leave the country until you settle up.
Generally the costs are fractions of what they are in the US. But they are not playing - they don't have confidence that once you are back in US or wherever that you'll pay.
Some countries even have exit fees etc. You are there until you pay to leave.
The other thing - you can be turned away for lack of payment more easily (or just not get great care) in other countries. In the US you can do a $10M bill on critical care at a hospital without paying anything - that just doesn't happen in some other countries in most cases - they don't have the $10M lying around etc or have more competing needs so you just can't stay on full support for years the way you might in US.
New Jersey for example allows for a religious objection to a medical declaration of brain death etc. As long as your heart keeps pumping you can be called alive and provided with intensive care (for years). And yes, your heart pumping can be mechanically driven, they can do feeding tubes and IV's etc - so this means "alive" for a very long time.
We need to be clear - that other countries will not provide govt or mandatory care in these types of cases.
In places like New Jersey - it is a crime to stop providing care (even when person is fully brain dead) or to stop paying for care if someone has a religious belief someone is alive.
“No health care practitioner or other health care provider, and no health service plan, insurer, or governmental authority, shall deny coverage or exclude from the benefits of service any individual solely because of that individual’s personal religious beliefs regarding the application of neurological criteria for declaring death.”
You can imagine the costs of these types of laws.
There is a small industry in places like California which cap malpractice awards in cases of death but don't if someone is alive to get folks to new jersey where they can be kept "alive" indefinitely to maximum legal payouts etc.
"• In some parts of the world it is common practice for patients to be detained in hospital for non-payment of healthcare bills.
• Such detentions occur in public as well as private medical facilities, and there appears to be wide societal acceptance in certain countries of the assumed right of health providers to imprison vulnerable people in this way.
• The true scale of these hospital detention practices, or ‘medical detentions’, is unknown, but the limited academic research to date suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are likely to be affected every year....
Women requiring life-saving emergency caesarean sections, and their babies, are particularly vulnerable to detention in medical facilities."
Slate Star Codex (Astral Codex Ten now) has an amazing piece on the sociology and psychology of the phenomenon of "Blue/Left American's" who enjoying trash talking America where he points out that these people who make an identity out of trash talking "America" as well as things like white men who write articles about "how terrible white men are" are not being self critical because those terms in this context are a code word for "Red/Right America" who are stereotypically more openly patriotic.
So it creates this great rhetorical tool of getting to seem humble and self critical on the surface while everyone knows you are really just complaining about the other side.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Truly one of my favorite things I have ever read. Put words on so many things that I felt but struggled to articulate.
Worth pointing out that I don't identify with conservative or right politics. I know because I'm critiquing one side here but it's not an indication of me being on the other side. I just find it to be an interesting point that matches my lived experience.
I'm also an American expat.
The large insurer will send checks for goods & services directly to the patient, rather than to the practice(s) that performed the service, even if this is a fairly reasonable cost.
Patients see a check for $8,000 and $25,000 that is supposed to go to the trauma surgeon's practice that initially stabilized the patient, followed by the Plastic Surgeon's practice that spent 16 hours, 2 titanium plates, and a large number of titanium screws, and biologic implants reconstructing the patient's face. And, similar for the small consults $300 consults to Opthamology and Neurology that are common to severe head trauma involving optic nerves, relatively minor brain injures and significant facial trauma.
Instead of providing it to the practice to pay for the plates/screws, and delivered services, the patient spends the money. Then the patient gets sued.
This is not uncommon unfortunately - even for medical practices that TRY to be in-network with every single insurer, AND medicare/medicaid.
But I could not imagine a worse recipient, in terms of responsibility, than a recently recovered addict.
But if they are going to continue willingly engaging with a party that jerks them around, I do not see who they have to blame but themselves.
My overall answer is that companies that bill insurance live in a complex world. Insurance tries to dodge payouts and will pay the insured; the facilities try to jam billing.
Perhaps an anecdote will be representative: I worked for one of the biggest providers, with dozens of facilities. They had a call center whose job it was to get insurance to approve another 3 days of treatment (30 day stay = 10 of these calls). Insurance companies don't staff their end, so the call centers were paying people to wait on the line for several hours, just to get treatment approved. (I ended up building a Twilio integration to queue up without a person on the phone.)
This is just a shitty, awful area of medicine and business and insurance.
"My mind went immediately to the stimulus payments," she says. "At least I have a way to take care of this now."
FFS. Zero chance this was a coïncidence.
No. But someone noticed stimulus payments were coming, looked up the debtors who owed amounts close to the stimulus amount and sent off aides to harass those people into turning over the money.
> Under the bill governing the second stimulus check, your funds could not be garnished to pay debts like child support, banks or private creditors. However, part of this rule changed with the third check.
> The bill authorizing the third payout was pushed through using a process called budget reconciliation. Congressional Democrats used this legislative tool to more quickly pass the new COVID-19 relief bill and the third stimulus check that comes with it, since it allowed them to pass it with fewer votes. But because this process was used, the third checks aren't protected from all garnishment, although lawmakers are moving to fix this now.
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/your-third-stimulus-ch...