As part of the check-in process, an Oklahoma Catholic hospital is offering some accident victims a waiver of signing that they do not want their health plan to be billed for care. One patient received the waiver shortly after a car accident in which her head hit the windshield. She said she had no reminder of signing the document but had a pledge of $ 34,106.
“The way they turn it, you don’t want to get your health insurance because someone else caused it,” said Loren Toombs, an Oklahoma trial attorney who represented the patient. “It’s clearly a business tactic and a major problem, but it’s not always illegal.”
Hospitals have been scrutinized in recent years as they increasingly turned to the courts to get back patient bills even amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hospitals, many of which have received substantial bailouts over the past year, have used these court rulings to garnish patients’ wages and move into their homes.
However, less attention was paid to hospital lien laws, which many states passed early in the 20th century when less than 10 percent of Americans had health insurance. Laws should protect hospitals from the burden of caring for uninsured patients and give them an incentive to treat those who could not prepay.
A century later, hospital liens are most commonly used to track debts of victims of car accidents. The practice can be as lucrative as documents and interviews show that some hospitals use outside debt collection companies to search police records for recent accidents to make sure they determine which of their patients may have been in a wreck to pursue can mortgage liens.
Some laws limit the amount of a patient’s agreement that a hospital can claim, and others only allow nonprofit hospitals to collect debts in this way. Certain states require hospitals to bill accident victims for health plans instead of using a lien. This approach is seen as more consumer friendly as patients benefit from the discounts health plans negotiated on their behalf.
“If there is a patient who has viable coverage from multiple sources, it would be a reasonable position to require payment from anyone who will pay more,” said Joe Fifer, executive director of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, a trading group of Hospitals tax officials.
