tropo

Or if you didn't have a card on you. Some people don't plan everything before they end up in hospital sick or injured. I'm sure they wouldn't have dragged you to a prison cell to wait for payment or put you back in a hospital ward and increase your bill. There is nothing they could have done. They were strong-arming you and it worked. That's no way to treat someone who has just been in hospital. Obviously Thailand's "over 1 billion baht" 3-year unpaid medical bills suggests they just end up losing it if they cannot collect payment. They should stop crying about this and realise it's the cost of doing (tourism) business. It's a drop in the ocean compared to their profits from the industry. Any major efforts will just cause a drop in tourism. Tourists and expats have choices and won't bother with Thailand if the requirements become too expensive or complicated. I'm sure the people (politicians) crying about this problem aren't short of a penny because of it.

LOL... they had laptops, not mainframe computers. They wouldn't even register on an electric bill. Cooking and air conditioning uses the juice. Now if they had something like this, then they would be using a lot of "juice"....

Really? So if you cannot pay they keep you there to increase the size of your bill - forever, if the person doesn't have the funds. Do they have cells at the hospital to imprison patients that can't pay? Hospital bills can soon become extreme and beyond most people's ability to pay if they don't have insurance... especially at certain hospitals that specialize in providing enormous bills to profit from travel insurance. Then of course there's the major problem of tourists or expats with insurance who can't claim insurance due to exclusions. For example, they are riding a motorcycle or driving a car without a valid licence. This is all much ado about nothing. 1 billion baht of unpaid hospital bills over 3 years with the number of tourists visiting Thailand is chicken feed. That's about USD $30,000 per day distributed over 100's of hospitals over the whole of Thailand. Only a very small percentage of these bills would be incurred by expats on 0-A visas. Most would be from regular short visit tourists. Most of the $30,000 per day would be recovered by hospitals padding bills for travel insurance companies.

I wonder what is bad for us (expats) if Pattaya dies a little? What are the expats so concerned about? From a purely selfish point of view, the worse the local and Thailand's economy, the better of I am. Easier to find good deals on rent and most other things. Unfortunately the lower tourist numbers haven't resulted in less congested streets. There are more buses than ever.

There's no crackdown at Jomtien as far as my experience is concerned. I did my 90 day report on Wednesday, 14 August, and had no problems at all despite never have filled out a TM30. Last month I did my annual extension - they never asked for it. To the OP, you might want to add a clause to your rental contract when it's up for renewal to get that lazy Russian to pay his dues. I have a clause stating the landlord is responsible for any fee or fine associated with the TM30. If I'm ever fined, he'll be paying it, not me. I won't have to ask him for it - I'll take it out of my rent payment.