Medical debt question

Hi everyone,

I was visiting the United States from Canada this past month and wound up in the emergency room. I have travel insurance but I fear that I may not be covered due to the fact that I did not call the insurance company in a timely manner and only sent in my claim a couple weeks later as I believed that the staff at the hospital had contacted the insurance company on my behalf when I gave them the insurance details.

Anyway, I now have a bill for around 10,000 USD. I don’t make very much money, around 25k CAD a year and I have no idea how I am going to be able to pay that. is there anyone here who works in hospital billing who can tell me what to do to negotiate this down? Some of the procedures they did are really overpriced, such as a CAT scan which was approximately 5x the bluebook price. I have no ties to America at all and I am wondering if I can leverage this, do they chase people down for debts in Canada?