The Lown Institute reports that if you aren’t able to pay your hospital bills, you have a one in three chance of being sued. On top of that, some hospitals are refusing to allow you to schedule new appointments.
Almost half of adults in the US find affording the cost of healthcare challenging. Forty percent of them have medical debt. And, many of those people in debt end up choosing to go without medical care or to leave the hospital against medical advice. Medical debt now totals somewhere between $81 to $140 billion.
The Lown Institute is collecting information on each hospital’s billing and collection practices. People should know which hospitals to avoid. That said, many hospitals are struggling to survive. There’s no excuse for hospitals filing lawsuits against patients, but the hospital system is broken. And, there’s also no excuse for the government standing back and watching hospitals go bankrupt because insurers are not paying them, to the detriment of their constituents.
The Leapfrog Group, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published a recent analysis of some hospital billing and collection data in JAMA. Of the more than 2,000 hospitals studied, a third said that they bring lawsuits against patients for delayed or inadequate payment of their bills. Rural hospitals sue patients more frequently than urban and suburban ones.
What’s equally appalling is that hospitals often do not provide patients with itemized bills within a month of services. And more than one in 20 hospitals surveyed had no representatives to help patients with billing questions or to look into billing errors or to set up a payment plan.
What is to be done? Lown does not propose national health insurance, likely because it’s not on the table at the moment. It should be. That’s the only way to ensure health equity and end medical debt. It’s also a far better way to ensure hospital solvency than allowing hospitals to sue patients for money they don’t have.
Lown is focused on better hospital billing practices. Insanity. Who could step in to ensure that hospitals did a better job of billing patients? The JAMA authors say that if we standardized hospital billing practices, there would be greater accountability. Good luck! At the very least, we should be standardizing hospital prices.
We should not leave it to the states to fix this problem. They do not have the will, the skill, the money or the power to take this on. Yes, a couple of states have done a little on credit reporting of medical debt. That’s something, but not wildly enough. How many millions more people will suffer the indignity of not being able to get medical care or of not being able to afford medical care or of being sued for not being able to pay medical bills before Congress acts?
Lown Institute suggests that documenting the problem could help promote health care affordability and hospital accountability. By the time they have the data they need and anyone’s attention, tens of millions of Americans will have been harmed by our travesty of a healthcare system.
Here’s more from Just Care:
- Some hospitals gouge Americans because they can
- For-profit hospitals urge CMS to hold Medicare Advantage plans to account for wrongful denials
- Underpayments lead hospitals and specialists to cancel Medicare Advantage contracts
- Rural hospitals accept Medicare Advantage at their peril
- If you’re in a Medicare Advantage plan, watch out! Your doctor or hospital might no longer be in-network