Wait, that was legal until now?!?

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hospitals in Maryland were suing patients over bills that should’ve been forgiven.

It wasn’t illegal. Until now. How a coalition changed that. This year.

Plus, our friends at Dollar For build their bill-crushing army, one Zoom training at a time.

Need help applying for charity care for you or a loved one? We compiled a list of five helpful tips.

Here's the transcript for this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. Earlier this year, this thing happened. The kind of thing nerds like me take note of.
0:05.3	The state of Maryland passed a law called the Medical Debt Protection Act unanimously.
0:10.4	And I spent a bunch of the last few weeks talking with some of the people who made it happen.
0:14.7	And there were a lot of them. This story turns out to be about how you build a coalition to make
0:19.8	change. Because it turns out that is still possible. At a time when our politics seemed so broken
0:25.8	and when so many of us have spent so much time fighting our own individual battles, feeling
0:30.4	pretty isolated. I think that's a story a lot of us can use.
0:35.6	This is an arm in a leg. A show about why healthcare costs so freaking much and what we can maybe do
0:40.2	about it. I'm Dan Weissman. I'm a reporter and I like a challenge. So my job on this show is to
0:45.7	take one of the most enraging, terrifying, depressing parts of American life and bring you a show
0:50.7	that's entertaining and empowering and useful. We've been chasing a deep story over the last
0:59.3	few episodes. How does change actually happen? How can things be made to suck at least a little bit
1:05.6	less? Specifically, we've been chasing the story of charity care or financial assistance from
1:10.8	nonprofit hospitals, which is most hospitals. 20 years ago, in most places, those hospitals were
1:17.6	absolutely no legal obligation to give anybody a break, no matter how poor they were, no matter how
1:23.4	impossible it would be for them to pay. And many hospitals didn't. In New York City, for instance,
1:29.8	no nonprofit hospital had a policy spelling out how to qualify for a break. And it's not like
1:35.2	it was just a New York problem. A group of big name lawyers put up class action lawsuits
1:40.1	around the country saying, hey, nonprofit hospitals get huge public subsidies, tax exemptions,
1:45.9	but instead of acting like charities, they're acting like loan sharks,
1:49.8	hounding their poorest patients to pay up, taking them to court, garnishing their wages. Isn't that
1:54.8	illegal? Courts were like, may not be nice, but no, not illegal. These days, nonprofit hospitals are
	...

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