Hospitals Can Be Hazardous To Your Financial Health

Last updated Sunday, October 29, 2006 8:07 PM CST in Columns

It's a three- or four-hour wait unless you're bleeding profusely, missing a body part, or you walk up to the nurse's window, gasp, and collapse while clutching your chest.

Otherwise, you're sitting there with people who are using the emergency room as their personal physician.

Get a good look at these folks. They are the people whose bill you're going to be paying, in addition to your actual bill.

After the wait and treatment, you're cut loose from the chute and finally get home. You'll get a bill in a few weeks saying, "This is not a bill."

Then the statement tells you that you owe an obscene amount of money because, after all, you're paying your bill plus everyone else in the emergency room who couldn't pay their bill. But never fear, the hospital has submitted your bill to your insurance.

The statement then says you'll be billed for whatever your insurance doesn't pay.

That next statement, however, never comes.

Instead, in about six months, your insurance company finally pays the hospital, and the hospital turns your remaining balance over to a collection agency -- without the courtesy of sending you a statement for the remainder of your bill.

So the first thing you know about any kind of amount you owe the hospital is via a collection agency threatening to take you to court if you don't respond to them in 30 days.

Welcome to Health Care 101 in the 21st century in the most technologically advanced country in the world. The only improvement in American health care in the past 20 years has been that hospitals have become more surgically adept at removing money from your bank account.

Don't get me wrong. I have a great deal of respect and gratitude for the people who work in our hospitals. They work long hours and one person is saddled with the work of three or four people because the big corporations have bought almost every hospital in Northwest Arkansas.

Corporations care more about their bottom line than your bottom line, except for the pocketbook that resides on it. In that vein, hospitals have taken to skipping directly to the collection agency because it cuts down on their overhead in billing.

They'll tell you it's because the clock starts ticking on your account at the time you were seen -- which is a line of bull. Don't send me a bill and tell me not to pay it if the clock is ticking on my credit rating.

So it winds up that not only has your insurance company paid the hospital more money than it ever cost the hospital to treat you, now they're trying to collect the extra $300 or $400 to cover the costs of all those people who clog up emergency rooms that are never going to pay their bills.

But it's not the deadbeats that hospitals go after. It's the God-fearing, bill-paying Americans that get threatened.

I learned a lesson about being too quick to pay a hospital bill a few years back.

A hospital had gone the collection route without a final bill. I disputed it.

Finally, I got tired of the phone calls and paid the $800 out of my own pocket, figuring I could recoup it from my insurance company when they finally paid up.

The problem? At the same time I was paying the hospital, the insurance check was in the mail.

The company that owned the hospital sold it, declared bankruptcy and -- as you can imagine -- my $800 claim against the bankrupt bunch was never so much as a blip on the radar screen of the crediitors they owed.

Just remember this. A collection agency can't collect on a bill that's never been sent to you. And you can pay the hospital $5 a month for the rest of your life. As long as you're making payments, there's nothing they can do but accept the money.

It's gotten to the point where you have to cover your own backside when you go to a hospital. Because it's a sure thing they won't even give you a gown that does.

Bob Caudle is a senior writer for the morning news who writes a humorous commentary on local, state and national issues. His column appears every sunday. He is an equal opportunity insulter.

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