UVA Doctors Decry Aggressive Billing Practices By Their Own Hospital

[mahatmakanejeeves]

BREAKING ALERT
UVA Doctors Decry Aggressive Billing Practices By Their Own Hospital
BY JAY HANCOCK Kaiser Health News 51 min ago

Prominent doctors at UVA Health System are expressing public outrage at their employer's practices to collect unpaid medical debt from its patients.

A Kaiser Health News report in September that showed UVA sued 36,000 patients over six years for more than $100 million, seizing wages and savings and pushing families into bankruptcy.

Like many physicians who work at U.S. medical centers, the UVA doctors said they had little idea how aggressively the hospital where they practice was billing and pursuing their patients for payment.

Although the health system has announced some interim measures to scale back collections practices, some of the system’s most senior physicians are now calling for UVA to stop suing its patients altogether. And they are urging the pursuit of an "immediate solution” to address the national epidemic of health care debt.

“We were appalled by the revelations of the aggressive, pitiless billing and collections practices” at UVA, Dr. Scott Heysell and two other senior staff members wrote in a letter to KHN published Saturday. “We felt betrayed,” they wrote, “and we had, by extension, betrayed those who had relied on us.”

Heysell, an infectious-disease specialist and associate professor at UVA School of Medicine, and his co-authors echoed other UVA researchers and clinicians contacted by a reporter who said they were surprised and dismayed by the health system’s practices.
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Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

[Hoyt]

1. What really ticks me off about hospital, health systems doing this is that if the patient is

uninsured, they'll often go after them for their entire charge.

It is not uncommon to see a hospital or physician's office sue a patient for the full charge of $3,500 for an appendectomy even though they'll accept payment from Medicare or a private insurer of $700 - $850 (and write-off the remainder as a contractual allowance).