<prompt> Human: I recently received a medical bill from a hospitalization that occurred 2 years ago. I was the victim of a muggingattack and had to get admitted to a hospital for X-Rays and whatnot. I was also...pretty inebriated at the time so my memory of incident is very hazy. At the time I was on my parents insurance and was not really involved in monitoring the statementsI basically just paid my Co-Pay when ever I needed to use it so I assumed that the matter was covered by insurance since my parents never brought it up. They were the ones that picked me up and provided the Insurance info since I had no walletmugging. Fast forward to now, where I am no longer on their insurance and I receive a bill for 5000 that appears to have never been sent to the insurance company. I am completely frozen and dont know how to proceed.My initial instinct is for meor my parents to call the hospitalmedical company to get more info and then call the previous insurance company to see if they will still cover the cost of the visit even though it happened so long ago. Is that a good plan? I dont know what legal rights I have in this matter so I would like to proceed very carefully so as to not accidentally admitdo something that would cost me that amount. Paying anywhere near that amount would devastate me financially.Is it even legal for a hospital to do this? 2 years is a long time to wait to send a bill, how can they expect that situations like mine wouldnt happen?Update: Thank you everyone for all of the advice on this! This community definitely has a way of making me feel better when I think the worst! Just wanted to give an update. The bill was indeed still with the hospital somehow and had not yet gone to collections. I gave their bill department a call and asked for them to send it to my insurance company that I had at the date of service. They said no problem and sent it over. That was it! No hassle or bargaining or any this crazy, they just sent it over. The weird thing is that they did have my insurance on file, but for some reason just never sent it to them... But anyway, from what I gathered from the comments here, now I just have to wait for my old insurance company to receive it, deny it, and then hopefully the hospital will just write it off since they were the ones who didnt send it to them in the first place. Fingers crossed!!!  <response>: The rest of the advice here is valuable, but if that all fails you can also contact the billing office at the hospital and see if they will reduce it significantly or write it off entirely. I was burned once by the charge for an anesthesiologist who wasnt covered by my health care, and the provider agreed to write off the cost after I called them to complain. 