Despite growing evidence of the harm caused by medical debt, hundreds of U.S. hospitals maintain policies to aggressively pursue patients for unpaid bills, using tactics such as lawsuits, selling patient accounts to debt buyers and reporting patients to credit rating agencies, a Kaiser Health News investigation shows.
The collection practices are commonplace among all types of hospitals in all regions of the country.
Individual hospital systems have come under scrutiny in recent years for suing patients. But the Kaiser Health News analysis shows the practice is widespread, suggesting most of the nation’s approximately 5,100 hospitals serving the general public have policies to use legal action or other aggressive tactics against patients.
At the same time, a majority of hospitals scrutinized by Kaiser Health News effectively shroud their collection activities, publicly posting incomplete or in many cases no information about what can happen to patients if they can’t pay.
These are among the findings of an examination of billing and financial aid at a diverse sample of 528 hospitals across the country. Over the past year, Kaiser Health News investigated each of these hospitals, reviewing thousands of pages of policies and other documents. The reporting also included thousands of telephone and email inquiries and interviews to obtain and clarify how hospitals handle patients with unpaid bills.