More lawsuits target patients
Hospitals keep suing even amid pandemic
Back in 2017, Cheryl Billings was having a run of bad health, so her trips to Cedar Park Regional Medical Center near Austin have since run together. That’s why when she was later served with court papers saying the 108-bed Williamson County hospital was suing her, she had no idea why.
The 64-year-old is disabled and lives on about $700 monthly in Supplemental Security Income and other federal assistance. The $5,255 she was told she owed for a hospitalization seemed almost laughable. Almost.
“There’s no way I can pay,” she said she told the hospital’s lawyer when she went to court Feb. 27. Billings noticed he seemed to have a tall stack of cases against other patients that day. She said the lawyer replied: “Not my problem.”
Across Texas a growing number of poor, unemployed or unsuspecting patients are being sued for uncollected medical debt in a trend that some see as predatory. The hospitals suing are typically for-profit facilities, often operating in rural or small towns. Between January 2018
and February 2020, more than 1,000 lawsuits were filed by 28 hospitals in 62 Texas counties, according to a sweeping new analysis of hospital financial records and court data by national health care experts. Those lawsuits sought a total of about $17.8 million from their patients, researchers found.
The study, “Eroding the Public Trust,” was compiled by researchers from universities including Johns Hopkins, Georgetown University School of Medicine, Columbia University School of Public Health and University of Texas in Austin.
Leading the list in Texas hospital lawsuits are facilities affiliated with Community Health Systems, a large, multibillion-dollar, for-profit national health system. This spring, the Tennessee-based company received $245 million in CARES Act federal bailout money to offset losses caused by the pandemic, according to government records.
The health system operates 97 hospitals in 17 states, including 11 in Texas, according to the company’s website.
Yet, even after the pandemic had spread and hundreds of thousands of Texans became unemployed, CHS hospitals continued to sue patients, the study released Wednesday shows. Since March 13, when Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster, more than 350 new lawsuits were filed against patients, said Sarah Blakemore, a researcher at University of Texas and one of the study’s authors.
“The whole point of a hospital is to provide care and help people, but these hospitals are bringing people to the brink of financial ruin,” Blakemore said Tuesday.
Emails and calls to Community Health System headquarters in Tennessee and to the Cedar Park hospital were not returned Tuesday.
The stories behind the numbers are often heartbreaking, Blakemore said.
One Round Rock couple was sued by Cedar Park Regional Medical Center for $4,392 in overdue bills plus attorney fees after their baby died, according to court documents reviewed by the Chronicle.
In a handwritten note in the court file, the husband wrote they thought the bill would be covered by insurance but was not and so they were making payments. He also said he had lost his job the year before but was now fully employed.
“We plan on making good on whatever insurance doesn’t cover. This debt is related to the premature birth that caused the death of our first son. Not an excuse for any nonpayment but obviously not a great memory and very hard for my wife and I,” he wrote.
Cedar Park Regional Medical Center filed 84 lawsuits against patients between 2018 and early this year, according to the study. It was only eclipsed by South Texas Regional Medical Center in Jourdanton, now renamed Methodist Hospital South, with 109 lawsuits.
South Texas Regional Medical Center was bought in July 2017 by HCA Healthcare and Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas in a joint partnership. The purchase did not include the debt, so the lawsuits included by that hospital in the study are still being sought by CHS, said Blakeman.
Within the troves of legal filings one law firm appears more than any other. The DeLoney Law Group, in Dallas, filed 83 percent of the lawsuits on behalf of Texas hospitals, the study found. It was the law firm that sued both Billings and the Round Rock couple.
“Patients stated the firm was incorrectly seeking debts for medical visits they never had, and those with true medical debt were provided with unclear and last-minute notifications of hearings leading to missed court appearances,” the report alleged.
Messages left for Christopher DeLoney, the primary lawyer at the firm who sues patients on behalf of hospitals, weren’t returned Tuesday.
The study showed that while the amount of unpaid bills is only a sliver of the hospitals’ revenue — on average 0.15 percent — the lawsuits represent deepening hardship on the patients being targeted. “What justification is there in these practices that devastate patients’ lives yet make minimal impact on the finances of a hospital system?” the authors ask.
For instance, CHS posted $3.02 billion in net operating revenue in its first quarter of 2020, according to a recent earnings call.
“The current health care system is failing the hardworking people of Texas,” the authors concluded in the study, “High uninsured rates, high outof-pocket spending and gaps in health coverage have exacerbated medical debt for those already struggling to pay their bills.”