When Ashley Pintos went to the emergency room of St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., in 2016, with a sharp pain in her abdomen and no insurance, a representative demanded a $500 deposit before treating her.
When Ashley Pintos sought emergency care at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., in 2016, an employee first demanded a $500 deposit, which Pintos couldn’t cover. After she was examined, Pintos was told by a doctor to buy an over-the-counter pain medication. The hospital later billed her for $839. “They were not quiet about me not having money,” she says.
These written-off bills, known as bad debt, represented a tenth of all nonprofit hospital bad debt reported to the IRS in either 2017 or the most recent year for which data is available. That sum may represent an undercount because it is based on self-reported estimates from hospitals and is not independently audited. And it does not include money that financially struggling patients eventually paid.
For those who do not qualify, hospitals often offer payment plans. But they can turn to aggressive tactics if bills are not resolved. Patients can be pestered by debt collectors, and some hospitals sue them or try to garnish their wages. Medical debt can damage credit ratings — one study calculated Americans had $81 billion in collections in 2016 — and forces some people into bankruptcy.
While some hospitals say they write off the debt of poor patients without ever resorting to collection measures, several hospitals whose practices were highlighted in news reports this year for aggressively suing patients admitted to the IRS they knew many unpaid bills might have been averted through their financial assistance policies.
“We are exceeding the requirements of state law and providing charity care compensation to patients who may be in most need, even if they never applied for charity care or did not actually qualify at the time of service,” Cary Evans, a Franciscan spokesman, said in a statement. Franciscan declined to discuss individual patients.
Pintos, who signed a written statement for the attorney general and was listed as a potential witness in the case, said the hospital never gave her an application even though she had qualified for charity care the previous year. “They made me feel like I wasn’t good enough to be there,” she said.
She sounds like me except I always pay for health insurance & never expect anyone to pay my way, also because ER copay visit is so high, I’d be dying (& often thought I was) before I’d go to an ER. Nonprofits have to cover costs, sure they’d cut her a deal or fill out your forms.
Medicare for All Bernie2020
People have to apply for charity care, it won’t just be given.
Everybody gotta eat. 😧
Even nonprofit hospitals need to make a profit. There are infinitely more people with meager incomes who don't get the care they need until the cost of their treatment is astronomical. Medical care should be a right, not a privilege.
To be a person put in that position or limited to certain treatments, can be a life and death situation! Non profits get donations to remain nonprofit and should not hold that status if they bill patients, but poor people would rather try and pay it, being poor is hard enough!
Yes they do and thatlead people who feel awkward to wonder isn’t that supposed to have been a non profit place and yet they send a bill? And will pursue to collections, so poor people are double dipped! Doctor wants a certain medicine, who can afford it? Visa can., no Visa no med