BANKRUPTCY Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

September 3, 2020

With conventions over, who will support or tear down crucial health supports?

Health care persists as one of the top concerns for voters as they consider candidates this fall — not just for the presidency but up and down the ballot.

A lot got said at the political conventions in the last two weeks on the topic, and, to their credit, media organizations have engaged in fact-checking and myth-busting about health-related topics.

But beyond the crafted speeches over four nights for each party and looming past the repeated talking points of the candidates and their hand-picked supporters, voters will confront issues of huge gravity — some well known and others maybe less so.

August 12, 2020

Missouri the latest state to show big backing for Medicaid and Obamacare

by Patrick A. Malone

Voters keep sending Republicans — in statehouses, Congress, and the White House — a clear message: Americans want affordable, accessible health insurance, most notably as offered under the GOP-loathed Affordable Care Act, and especially for the poor and working poor via Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

This issue, if anything, may be rising in importance to the U.S. electorate as the Covid-19 pandemic rages without check and millions of Americans wrestle with pervasive joblessness that wiped out many people’s health insurance coverage.

Just weeks after voters in red Oklahoma backed a state constitutional amendment to expand Medicaid and narrowly defied the opposition of powerful GOP politicians who have dominated their state, residents of the “Show Me” state of Missouri showed up in force to approve Missouri’s expansion of the program coverage, by a 53% to 47% margin.

November 10, 2019

Hospital tries to stick ER nurse with $1 million in debt for her preemie’s care

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s the price and cost problem, stupid. That’s a fictitious but new tattoo that voters might want politicians to take up as they consider the many major problems with the American health care system, especially as yet more medical billing outrages surface.

Marshall Allen, a reporter for ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative site, posted about a doozy: It’s about almost $1 million in charges that a hospital group sought to saddle a new mom with, even as she wrestled with pregnancy complications and an ailing premature baby.

That mom also happened to be an emergency room nurse. And the chain that flubbed her medical bill was her own employer: Dignity hospitals. That’s a Christian medical enterprise that describes itself as the fifth largest health system in the nation and has as its motto, “Hello, human kindness.” As Allen reported, it’s worth noting this, too, about Dignity:

September 29, 2019

Is Sanders’ plan to erase $81 billion in U.S. medical debt really all that crazy?

by Patrick A. Malone

Critics have attacked Sen. Bernie Sanders for his proposal to wipe out $81 billion in medical debt, including by changing rules around debt collection and bankruptcy. He also called for “replacing the giant credit reporting agencies with a ‘public credit registry’ that would ignore medical debt when calculating credit scores,” reported the New York Times.

Well, there he goes again, with interesting but hard to execute ideas, critics replied to Sanders’ medical debt idea, dissecting it to pieces.

But dig into some of the news articles and important realities flare up. Even his critics concede that medical debt has become a nightmare for too many Americans, contributing in unacceptable fashion to family stress and anxiety and, more importantly, adding to the nightmare of medical bankruptcy.

September 18, 2019

There hospitals go again: UVA Health backpedals on draconian debt collection

by Patrick A. Malone

Is a public pillorying the only way to stop big hospitals from pursuing patients for medical debt with the zeal of demons from the underworld?

The University of Virginia Health System — an enterprise that racked up an $87 million operating profit on revenue of $1.7 billion in the fiscal year ending in June and that holds stocks, bonds and other investments worth about $1 billion — has become the latest institution to get a journalistic blaming and shaming for extreme debt collection practices that would make proud Inspector Javert in Les Miserables.

The independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service and the Washington Post deserve credit for their investigation into UVA avariciousness. As KHN reported of the state operation:

September 17, 2019

With GOP still tearing at ACA, uninsured rate rises for first time in decade

by Patrick A. Malone

The Grand Old Party may have just won the dictionary definition of a Pyrrhic Victory. That’s because Republicans’ decade-long assault on the Affordable Care Act his finally showing predictable results, with the share of Americans lacking health insurance increasing for the first time in 10 years.

The rate and number of people without health insurance increased from 7.9%, or 25.6 million, in 2017 to 8.5%, or 27.5 million, in 2018, officials reported.

The nation’s children got a kick in the face, too, with almost half a million more youngsters uninsured in 2018 versus 2017 — a decline attributable mostly to a reduction in the number of kids covered by safety net programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program aka CHIP.

September 3, 2019

Transplant patient’s nightmares illustrate why patients fear and loathe medical bills

by Patrick A. Malone

It may be bad for the blood pressure. But to understand a key reason why Americans seethe when talking about medical bills and medical costs, just start perusing a timely new magazine report on hospitals and debt collection.

The Atlantic article — “What Happens When You Don’t Pay a Hospital Bill” — details the horrors and frustrations experienced by Joclyn Krevat, an occupational therapist in New York. She sought medical care for what she thought was a nasty case of flu. She, instead, suffered from a severe heart inflammation — and ended up undergoing a costly and physically draining heart transplant.

Weak, sick, and on the brink, Krevat still was hounded by out-of-control debt collectors — cruel men and women who not only lack hearts of their own but who engage in relentless, often ridiculous tactics (like trying to connect on social media, just to harp on patients there about their bills) to wring pennies out of those with illness and injury, reported writer Olga Khazan.

June 11, 2019

Faith-based charity as the answer to crushing medical debt? Only in America.

by Patrick A. Malone

Praise be: Churches nationwide are leaping in with their congregations’ blessing and financial support, putting up small sums to buy up and wipe out one of the huge shames of the American health care system: patients’ medical debt.

The faithful work with RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit organization based in Rye, N.Y., that provides the know-how to many kinds of donors to help eliminate bills that can crush patients and their loved ones for a lifetime, the Kaiser Health News service reported. Roxie Hammill wrote how this all works in modern medicine:

May 30, 2019

Congress and White House find a bipartisan target in medical bills and prices

by Patrick A. Malone

Doctors, hospitals, health insurers, and Big Pharma have become so abusive to patients with their billing and pricing that they may have accomplished what many consider a political impossibility ̶ angering Democrats and Republicans in Congress as well as the White House, pushing them all toward bipartisan legislation and executive actions.

Don’t bet on the exact outcome of the latest stirrings. They’re grist for a surge in coverage by the New York Times (click here), Washington Post (here), Wall Street Journal (here), Kaiser Health News (here), Modern Health Care (here), Stat (here), and Pro Publica (here). The stories point out that the partisan divide is too great for Congress and the White House to get near serious work on big health care-related issues like improving the Affordable Care Act.

So, instead, as the articles report, lawmakers are taking varying approaches to attack medical billing, particularly so-called surprise bills (out-of-pocket charges patients get hit with when they get medical services from providers outside their health insurance networks) and balance billing, when medical providers chase patients for charges above what they’ve already recouped from insurers. Health reporters have drilled down on stories about such billing outrages. Drug and hospitals prices also are big targets.

May 16, 2019

Hospitals rip employer health plans with prices up to 3 times what Uncle Sam pays

by Patrick A. Malone

Big businesses, which beat on their employees to be more cost-conscious, efficient, and productive, may need to take a page out of their own books if they hope to better control the soaring health care costs that they’re also shoving off onto their workers.

That’s a key takeaway from new research by the independent, nonprofit RAND Corporation into prices paid in 25 states to 70 hospital systems by job-provided health insurers in 2017. They provide coverage for most Americans, more than 180 million of us, and RAND found that private employer-sponsored health plans paid hospitals on average twice or even three times as much as Uncle Sam did through the Medicare program for the same services at the same hospitals.

Hospitals bellyache about tight-fisted Medicare prices that Uncle Sam can negotiate due to big dollars and huge number of patients covered under its senior health care plan. Although hospitals call the government-negotiated prices too low and an unfair benchmark, they provide realistic insights into hospitals’ bottom-line charges in what is one of the biggest areas of Americans’ health care costs. As RAND researcher Christopher Whaley told Modern Healthcare, an industry-covering news organization: