Uncharitable Care:Hospitals Are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured

[Guest guest]

Uncharitable Care:How Hospitals Are Gouging and Even Arresting the UninsuredBy The Staff of Democracy Now! What do the Emir of Kuwait and the working poor of the United States have in common? Not much, except when it comes to paying for health care in the United States. They all pay the highest price: up to 500% more than the hospital receives from insured patients. That's because hospitals negotiate discounts with big institutions like insurance companies, HMOs or the government that require payment of only a fraction of the listed charges. Those institutions have substantial bargaining power and can guarantee hospitals a certain number of patients. Uninsured people, on the other hand, have no bargaining power and are left to fend for themselves once they get their bills. A Return to Debtors Prisons Hospitals in several states have actually had patients arrested and jailed if they are unable to pay their debts. This legal tactic is chillingly known as body attachment. "Body attachment is basically a warrant for arrest," says Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of Champaign County Health Care Consumers in Illinois. She says that if a patient misses a court date, that they may not even know they have, the attorneys for the hospitals or collection agencies can ask the judge to issue a warrant for the patient's arrest. "They can go out immediately and find that person or it can just kind of be out there and then if the person gets pulled over, for example, for having a taillight out or speeding or something, it pops up, and then shows a warrant for arrest and the person gets brought in, and then they get incarcerated," says Lennhoff. Take the case of Jim Bean, a musician in Urbana, Illinois. More than a decade ago, he received treatment at the Carle Foundation Hospital, the primary teaching hospital of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, for a gunshot wound after a failed suicide attempt. He attended 13 court dates to answer to his $7,718 hospital bill. But then Bean missed a hearing, which he says he did not know was scheduled. The hospital asked the court for an arrest warrant. "They put out this body attachment that I found out about the next day. I went and turned myself in," recalls Bean. "I went to find out what was going on, and they told me to go across the street to the county sheriff's office where I turned myself in. I was jailed, and I was put into general population at the satellite facility here until my brother could come up with 10% of $3,500 to bail me out of jail." Bean says the next time he went to court, the attorneys for Carle Hospital asked that Bean's bail money be applied toward his debt to the hospital. The judge approved the request. "It was just a really quick way for them to collect $350," he says. "I had no say in that." In an interview with Democracy Now!, Robert Tonkinson, chief financial officer for Carle Foundation Hospital, said the hospital would not end its practice of having patients arrested. "We are exercising more review, and more care and more direction over that practice," says Tonkinson. But he says, "The reason we're not willing to say that we'll never, never use that practice again is because we do feel a very strong obligation to be a good steward of the resources we have." He adds that sometimes having people arrested is "the only option left in order to get the information we need to see if these people qualify for our charity programs or in assistance in other ways is to pursue that process." Bean has been dealing with his debt to Carle Hospital for more than 12 years. http://www.democracynow.org/static/healthcare.shtml