When hospitals sue patients (part 2)

An Arm and a Leg

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

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hey! The BEST time to support this show with a donation just got even better. Right now, any gift you make, up to $1,000, will be matched TWO for ONE, thanks to a few super-generous Arm and a Leg fans who’ve pooled their dough. . It’s a great deal, and it will set us up to kick maximum butt in 2024. Here’s the link, go for it!

And… are you ready for our most-ambitious story yet? We’ve been working on this investigation all year, with our partners at Scripps News and the Baltimore Banner.

With those partners, we’ve dug up some surprising (and possibly uplifting) news about lawsuits in three states – Maryland, New York and Wisconsin — and what that news might mean for the rest of the country.

This is part two of a two-part series. In part one, we examined the phenomenon of hospitals suing patients in bulk – sometimes hundred or thousands at a time – over unpaid bills.

We learned that in many cases, those patients are struggling financially, and that the lawsuits aren’t very lucrative for hospitals anyway. So why did they happen in the first place? As one former collections industry insider told us, those decisions are “philosophically based.”

In this episode — before getting to those surprising/hopeful findings — we try to understand that “philosophy,” perhaps best described as: business-as-usual. We speak with a former hospital billing executive and a representative from the third-party collections industry.

This series is produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

… and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Dan, super quick. If you appreciate what we're doing here on an arm and a leg,
0:04.4	I want to ask you to help us out. The biggest source of funding for this show is you.
0:09.1	And right now, any donation you make is going to be matched dollar for dollar thanks to news match from the Institute for Nonprofit news like you give us 50 bucks. They make it a hundred just like that.
0:20.4	You can do that right now at arm and a leg show dot com slash support thanks okay
0:26.1	here's a show hey there so this is part two of a two-part story and if you miss
0:31.2	part one or just want a refresher. Here's three quick
0:34.7	things. First, some hospitals definitely not all sue a lot of patients over unpaid bills, hundreds even thousands every year. Second,
0:50.0	there's very little money in it for these hospitals.
0:54.0	When reporters and researchers add up the total amounts they're suing for,
0:58.0	it looks tiny compared to say their annual surplus or what they pay executives. Tiny. Third, there's
1:10.2	data showing a lot of the people being sued are pretty hard up already,
1:16.4	that a lot of them would qualify for charity care under the hospital's own financial assistance policies. In fact, as we reported last time, a guy
1:27.2	named Nick McLaughlin who spent a decade working for a medical bill collections
1:32.2	agency now runs a business telling hospitals
1:36.0	they'd be better off financially writing these bills off through charity care
1:41.8	or financial assistance programs.
1:44.4	And I should point out, Nick is not a do-good crusader.
1:49.0	He has started a business to help hospitals do this.
1:52.8	And he has staked his family's financial future on it.
1:57.2	Had a good but challenging conversation with my wife
2:00.4	and she said, hey, so it's the reason we're not doing this full time
2:04.1	because we're scared the money's not kind of coming.
	...

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