Illustration: Kevin Hong
Angelia Fowler was surprised to learn that the debt-collection agency she says is ruining her life is owned by the hospital company that saved it.
Fowler had been sick for months in November 2015 when her son finally took her to the emergency room with what turned out to be pneumonia. She spent much of the next month in a coma in intensive care at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The bill arrived in January. After discounts, the hospital wanted her to pay $80,770. Other bills from specialists boosted the sum she owed above six figures, enough to buy a condo in West Palm Beach. It was a sum she couldn’t pay.
Millions of patients like Fowler are on the receiving end of the health-care industry’s collections machine. The amount of past-due medical debt in the U.S. is about $75 billion, spread […]
My dear wife Barbara and I know how that scenario plays out. Our new hospital called UPMC or University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, is a huge conglomerate that has bought up other hospitals all around the western area of Pennsylvania. They charge very large sums for very little things and if you cannot pay they use tactics which are intolerable to try to make you pay. For instance, when my wife went to the hospital with her second heart attack, she stayed only two days, had no operations but just rested and her medications were changed because her doctor and our pharmacy caused her to be there in the first place, because they couldn’t get the correct dosage of medication when the pharmacy stopped selling Bumex which was replaced by Lasix and they got the dosage wrong and her lungs were filling up with blood because of a leaky Mitral valve which could not be repaired according to our cardiologist who felt her heart was too weak to withstand the operation since it had been enlarged by the pressure. They charged us $15,000 for a two day stay and our part of the bill came to over $1,200 which we did not have. I asked them to give us a reasonable time to pay the bill and suggested we would pay $10 per month until it was paid off. They said OK and sent me a contract which allowed us to use that payment method. Every month they send us a statement saying we did not pay on time or that we missed a payment or that the payment was late. It was all “bull”; it was all wrong. I keep records of every payment and I pay the bill on time every month, but they still keep pressuring us with these bogus claims, taunting us with these outrageous claims, I guess they think if they pressure us enough we will some how come up with money out of “thin air” to pay off the bill. So you see, the UPMC giant has become another company that cares more about getting their money so their CEO can make his $1,000,000 plus salary every year, and they care more about collecting money than they do about curing illness.
I should add that they also bought out the only other hospital in the area which, by coincidence was a St. Mary’s hospital. They also bought up the major cardiologist’s office which is now called UPMC Cardiology, as well as our major family doctor clinic which used to be called Mainline Medical, but now goes by the title UPMC Mainline Medical, and all the other medical units like the separate clinics for diabetes, etc. and the blood testing units which all have UPMC in front of their titles. And, as well, all the payments for all these once separate units have their money funneled through the UPMC payment center in Pittsburg.
This same thing is happening all over the western half of Pennsylvania, and will probably go further into other states as well. It disgusts me to see this happening. We used to have choices about where to go for our health needs but not anymore.