Northwell says it will stop suing patients during pandemic

Northwell Health has vowed to stop suing patients over unpaid bills during the COVID-19 pandemic following a report that it sued thousands of patients last year.

Not-for-profit Northwell, New York state’s biggest private hospital system, sued more than 2,500 patients last year, a New York Times investigation found. Over the same period, almost all other major private hospitals in the state voluntarily halted the practice after Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered public hospitals to do so. Northwell has said it will drop those claims.

Suing over unpaid bills is an extreme practice that hospital leaders say they’d prefer to avoid, but some argue is necessary when patients don’t meet their financial assistance criteria. There isn’t much national data on how often it happens. Rather, such litigation commonly comes to light through media reports, such as the 2019 Kaiser Health News investigation that found UVA Health System in Charlottesville, Va., sued about 6,000 patients per year. That same year, Modern Healthcare reported that Ballad Health in Johnson City, Tenn., had filed about 5,700 lawsuits against patients in its first fiscal year as a health system.

In Northwell’s case, spokesperson Barbara Osborn wrote in an email that 23-hospital Northwell paused legal filings from April through September, and has decided to extend that given the resurgence in COVID cases. That’s in addition to rescinding any legal claims filed in 2020. The exception to the pause was Northwell’s Mather Hospital in Port Jefferson, N.Y., which is not fully integrated into the system’s revenue cycle system. That’s being fixed, Osborn said.

“In the rare instances (less than 0.1% of claims) that Northwell is compelled to take legal action, it is only when a patient has been unresponsive to multiple attempts to resolve the outstanding balance and if it is determined that the patient has a strong ability to pay,” Osborn said.