(Editorial comment: Your money or your life. A new American extortion racket.
PC)
Debt Collector Is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.
This and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debts, Accretive Health, were revealed on Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general, raising concerns that such practices have become common at hospitals across the country. The tactics, like embedding debt collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment, were outlined in hundreds of company documents released by the attorney general. And they cast a spotlight on the increasingly desperate strategies among hospitals to recoup payments as their unpaid debts mount.
To patients, the debt collectors may look indistinguishable from hospital employees, may demand they pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all, even using scripts like those in collection boiler rooms, according to the documents and employees interviewed by The New York Times.
In Congress, a Move to Look Into a Medical Debt Collector
A California representative is calling for an investigation into Accretive Health, one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debt, for potentially violating a federal law that requires hospitals to provide emergency care regardless of citizenship, legal status or the ability to pay. The congressman, Pete Stark, a Democrat who is the highest ranking member of the subcommittee that oversees Medicare and other health services, on Thursday asked Marilyn B. Tavenner, the acting administrator for the Medicare and Medicaid agency, to investigate the company’s practices. He sent an identical letter to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, Daniel R. Levinson.
In an interview, Mr. Stark said that he was most alarmed about Accretive’s tactics of demanding that patients seeking emergency care pay outstanding balances before receiving treatment. Mr. Stark said he was spurred to action after reading about Accretive’s practices in an article in The New York Times on Wednesday. “The behavior is potentially criminal,” said Mr. Stark, who wrote the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, the law mandating that hospitals provide care even to patients who are unable to pay for it.
Though my grandson and I are in two different sections of the country and both facing different cancer scares, we share one thing more prominently than anything else. We are being violated as human beings in need of medical care by our health providers’ need to protect profits. The money comes first; the patient is but a necessary cog in the healthcare revenue wheel.
Mercy: 'no aggressive collection practices'
Posted:Today
Updated: 10:44 AM
The hospital says it will not tolerate its contractor using techniques that have made it the object of a Minnesota suit.
PORTLAND - Mercy Hospital said Thursday that it will not tolerate aggressive bill-collection practices, such as posting debt collectors in emergency rooms and at patients' bedsides, by a contractor it hired this month.
http://www.pressherald.com/news/mercy-no-aggressive-collection-practices_2012-04-27.html
Health care reform: Is it ‘fair’?
A critique of the Affordable Care Act and a proposal for Maine
By Alice E. Knapp
Maine AllCare, April 24, 2012
Good people reasonably disagree on the merits of “Obamacare” (the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or “ACA”). Recent Congressional Budget Office estimates, however, project the ACA will leave approximately 27 million Americans uninsured in 2016 and beyond. While I might once have been persuaded that the law’s coverage gains justifies its failings, I now equate leaving 27 million Americans uninsured with having passed a law that freed but 90 percent of this nation’s slaves.
I view the ACA as symptomatic of this country’s corrosive slide into divisive, winners/losers politics. The law’s defenders have remained silent on why they believe it appropriate to extend through Medicaid expansions near free, comprehensive health insurance to millions of low income Americans while leaving millions of moderate income Americans similarly unable to afford comprehensive coverage to fend for themselves.
Visiting the Kaiser Foundation’s Health Reform Subsidy Calculator and entering two hypothetical, 52-year-old residents of a high-cost state like Maine illustrates the inadequacy of the ACA’s individual mandate premium subsidies and their arbitrary nature.
http://www.pnhp.org/print/news/2012/april/health-care-reform-is-it-‘fair’
Daily Activity Tied to Lower Alzheimer’s Risk
By NICHOLAS BAKALARHigher levels of daily physical activity are associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, new research suggests.
The report, in the April 24 issue of Neurology, included 716 people, average age 82, without cognitive impairment. Each wore a wrist actigraph, a device that measures movement, for about 10 days to establish his or her usual level of daily physical activity. Over the next four years, 71 of them developed Alzheimer’s.
Discriminatory health care law deserves challenge
Posted April 25, 2012, at 6:06 p.m.
Sometimes it takes a single heart-rending personal story to get things moving to right a wrong. That is what’s going on in the case of a legal immigrant, Hans Bruns of Fort Fairfield.
Bruns has suddenly lost the state health benefits that have helped him survive the pain and suffering from a rare form of cancer. A letter from the Department of Health and Human Services informed him that his health care coverage had been reduced because of a law that Gov. Paul LePage had pushed through the Maine Legislature last year.
Doctor Pay: Where The Specialists Are All Above Average
Making a living practicing medicine is more complicated and frustrating than ever. But it still pays. And pretty well.
