This is a pretty big misconcepion as well. When you ask for this per FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act), it has to pause the collection process (stopping it from reporting to credit & stopping phone calls while they order it from the hospital), but that may be all it does. Once the IB is sent, collection can continue. It is not a guarenteed way to stop the debt.

If you want to stop the debt say “I DISPUTE the validity of this debt.” The dispute word is very important here. On top of this also get the name of the agency and the person you’re speaking with, ideally before the dispute word, in case they breach this violation you can sue. You can also sue if they affect your credit after saying you dispute it. It’s very very very rare agencies will follow up with asking for money after using the dispute word because its often too resource intensive for them. After this tell them to not contact you by any means. They legally cannot contact you at this point.