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

December 30, 2022

Getting and keeping your own medical records: It’s a boon to better health

A laptop and a cardboard box. These two items could be major tools in improving regular folks’ health throughout this year — and beyond — if they get launched on important tasks, pronto.

What needs to happen is for patients to be hyperconscious, persistent, and skeptical enough to start gathering vital records about themselves and their medical care. The documents they should have handy include all their medical records, as well as a file of any bills, insurance statements, and correspondence with providers about their treatment.

It might seem like a lot of bumpf. But consider, with patience: Doctors value the material so much that they make it their prime order of business in taking on a patient’s care to look fast and first at the individual’s health record.

November 18, 2022

A busy holidays reminder: It’s use-it-or-lose-it time with health savings accounts

by Patrick A. Malone

Just how much do you love the company for which you work? Is it enough to want to fork over hundreds or even thousands of dollars that you could spend to benefit the health of you and your loved ones?

Before the hectic holidays engulf us all, your personal finances can benefit if you check your 2022 health care spending, especially taking account of sums you may have set aside in special accounts offered through your employer.

These are known as Health Care Flexible Spending Accounts, aka FSAs. As the federal government defines and explains them to its own employees:

June 30, 2019

Nonprofit hospitals hound patients with draconian debt collections

by Patrick A. Malone

Nonprofit hospitals added almost $40 billion to their bottom lines in the last year and lavished a $3.5 million average salary on their chiefs. But their relentless grubbing for cash apparently was unsated still. The institutions, exempted from federal, state and local taxes in exchange for “community benefits” like charity care and financial support for patients in need, are acting like Dickensian debt collectors, harassing patients with lawsuits and wage garnishments.

Pro Publica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative web site, partnered with MLK50, a local news organization, to describe the avalanche of financial travail with which Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare has inundated its poor and middle-class patients in Memphis, Tenn. The hospital, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, has filed more than 8,300 lawsuits pursing “aggressive collection practices [that] stand out in a city where nearly 1 in 4 residents live below the poverty line.” As the journalists reported of Le Bonheur:

“Its handling of poor patients begins with a financial assistance policy that, unlike many of its peers around the country, all but ignores patients with any form of health insurance, no matter their out-of-pocket costs. If they are unable to afford their bills, patients then face what experts say is rare: A licensed collection agency owned by the hospital. Lawsuits follow. Finally, after the hospital wins a judgment, it repeatedly tries to garnish patients’ wages, which it does in a far higher share of cases than other nonprofit hospitals in Memphis. Its own employees are no exception. Since 2014, Methodist has sued dozens of its workers for unpaid medical bills, including a hospital housekeeper sued in 2017 for more than $23,000. That year, she told the court, she made $16,000. She’s in a court-ordered payment plan, but in the case of more than 70 other employees, Methodist has garnished the wages it pays them to recoup its medical charges.”

December 3, 2017

Tax bill will have big health care effects, none of them good

by Patrick A. Malone

It may take days, weeks, years, or even a decade to fully determine what the Republicans in Washington have done to the nation’s health care with the U.S. Senate’s middle-of-the-night approval of more than $1 trillion in changes to the U.S. tax code. But it will at least be big, and maybe huge.

The House and Senate still must reconcile their versions, and President Trump must agree to what lawmakers settle among themselves. So the extent of the health harms the ostensible tax bill—which many have said is really a health bill with tax cuts attached—may inflict on Americans remains up in the air, to a degree.

Millions will lose their health insurance coverage, because the tax bill repeals Obamacare’s requirement that taxpaying citizens show they have health coverage, the so-called individual mandate. Without the mandate, consumers can wait to buy insurance until they get sick, the equivalent of buying fire insurance on your house when it’s burning down. But this means insurers have to jack up rates to offset all the gaming of the system. It also opens the way to “skinny” or skimpy health plans that really offer little or no coverage for the sick or those in need of medical services.

February 19, 2017

Will lawmakers on break get an earful over GOP’s outline for Trumpcare?

by Patrick A. Malone

Members of Congress are home in their districts for a week-long break, and many lawmakers are expected to get an earful from voters upset over many issues at the start of the Trump Administration, especially this: What the heck’s going on with health care?

Republicans have insisted for years now—counter-factually, as the evidence has amply demonstrated—that they had a cheaper, better, more inclusive alternative to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The promised to repeal the ACA on the day they gained control of Congress and the White House. That hasn’t happened. Nor has the GOP proffered its vaunted replacement. Instead, the party had talked in recent days about an ACA repair.

But under fire from their most conservative party members, Republican leaders have thrown up what they call an outline of Trumpcare. The GOP has moved from lots of R’s—repeal, replace, and repair—to some C’s and D’s: Costly, callous, divisive, and cruel. Those are some ways their retread plan elements (dubbed “déjà vu all over again” in one report) could be described. The outline still faces major challenges, not the least of which is whether a chaotic White House and a lumpen Congress can conduct the nation’s business and enact public policy.