Phil Hughes is a homeless handy-man who’ll paint your house number on your curb for $5 and some turkey leftovers, says Mary Olsen, a homeowner who hires Hughes for occasional odd jobs.
When Hughes got sick, Mary Olsen told him to put down her name as an emergency contact.
“I didn’t want him to die and not know about it,” she told the Contra-Costa Times. Hughes spent 3 or 4 days in the hospital and the bill came to Mary Olsen’s house. It was for $42,000.
It was pages and pages and pages,” she said. “They detail every shot they give you, every antibiotic, every aspirin.
“Phil and I were laughing about it. Here’s a homeless man who doesn’t have a penny to his name and he has this enormous hospital bill. How’s he going to pay it?”
The humor quickly evaporated when a collection agency began hounding her with phone calls looking for Hughes. The collectors especially liked to call early Saturday mornings.
She told them Hughes did not live there, was homeless and could not afford to pay. Her pleas made no difference: The calls continued daily for a couple of weeks.
Finally, Mary had to threaten the debt collectors with media exposure to get the calls to stop. The hospital can’t discuss Mr. Hughes directly, but told the Contra-Costa Times that John Muir Hospital “seeks reimbursement through a county program for indigent adults. It does not bill patients or put them through collections.”
Mary Olsen says she’s happy with the care that her friend received at the hospital, but is less than thrilled with the debt collectors. “Phil is so obviously an indigent person that no one would expect he would have enough money for lunch,” she said, “let alone a hospital bill.”
Hospital seeks $42,000 — from a homeless man [Contra-Costa Times]
(Photo:Contra-Costa Times)
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@Mojosan:
And 40 million won’t have health and will be forced to go to the ER for all health care needs, running up the cost to all of us.
What’s your solution to that? Let them all die? Are you one of those “compassionate conservatives” that were mentioned earlier?
That should read “won’t have health CARE”. D’oh!
@E-Bell:
Debt collection costs money. Sending out bills that will obviously never be paid just puts further burden on the health care system.
@joebloe: Amen brother!
I’ve had it with abusive hospital debt collectors. last summer i broke my arm, paid on the spot for very shoddy hospital care (they didn’t put me in a room but rather, just left me on a seat in the hall and told me they didn’t have a room, the doctor couldn’t speak English and it wasn’t until i went to another doctor that i even knew what kind of break it was… and then I paid over $500 at the hospital before leaving (no, I’m not insured, my boss was too cheap for that and I didn’t make enough money to afford that, too.)
so anyway, a few months later I get a bill in the mail demanding $600+ more. i send a letter, demanding to see an itemized list of what the charges entail (a friend told me its a common practice to charge a room fee or a diagnosis fee, which i wanted to protest since I really didn’t get either.) instead, i get a bill back, with the exact same format as the first one. just when i thought i was getting somewhere, the hospital instead sells the debt to a third-party collector….
got another call from them today, over a year after the actual incident. they’re not getting a single red cent from me, especially seeing as how they don’t have my SSN.
@E-Bell:
What is actually shocking is your ignorance ass-hat.
First, is the system that causes and condones this behavior.
Second is the collection agencies that think they can break any rule they want just to get paid.
Third is folks like you that think this behavior is fine that prevent the system (see item 1) from changing.
@jwissick: all those people in the ER are IN the ER cus it’s the ONLY PLACE THEY CAN GO TO. They don’t have health insurance, and when they’re sick, they get worse, and end up in the ER where they won’t be turned away. oh yeah, let’s abolish the ER’s altogether so only the people w/ insurance can get health care.
See, the System doesn’t work for poor people. It works for you, cus you can afford health insurance. With your logic it seems that people who can’t afford health insurance deserve to die.
I say, cut the homeless dude some slack, and most hospitals do have programs that write off (eliminate?) most if not all of the debt. And you responsible people can keep paying our super high hospital bills when we end up in the ER.
@jwissick: I’m totally with you man. What’s with these poor people claiming “rights” that they can’t even pay for?! It’s like the police – I pay WAY more in taxes because I’m a productive member of society and not some lazy bum, so why are THEY always sucking up MY police resources?? The cops shouldn’t even bother answering a 911 call if someone’s shot in the ghetto! And like those public parks — who do you think pays for those? Not THE POOR! Whenever I see some poor person in the park, I’m all like “Go play in the street – you didn’t pay for this nice green space!”
Don’t even get me started on those losers who call the fire department because their homes are burning down. Too late, suckers – you just lost all your assets so how are you possibly going to pay for the service to put out the fire?!
Wow, what a great world without shared public services, huh!
@Beerad:
You forgot all those commies over at the library.
@Mojosan: And the indigent guy who works for turkey sandwiches can pay for his health care.
Oh wait, no he can’t.
See where that falls apart?
My daughter works for a mortgage company. Almost everyone that comes into her office with tarnished credit is because of medical collections.
Ok, I think he should be held responsible for the bill. But, if you think he shouldn’t have to pay, then you go ahead and foot the bill. Just don’t expect/force me to pay for it in any aspect because you think it’s right and since I had no part in his becoming homeless/getting hurt/laughing at the bill.
Hey guys! Let’s all place the blame on someone else! YAY! HOORAY for lack of personal responsibility!
@SCATYB:
That’s because medical services are so outrageously expensive.
I was in an auto accident 2 yrs ago with my kids. Both my kids had to be air-lifted to a children’s hospital an hour away, while I went to the local hospital. I get the bill for the “air ambulance” and they charged me 10,000$ for each of my kids! I called them and asked them if my kids shared the helicopter and they said yes. I then asked why they charged $10,000 a piece (I have 2 kids). They said that’s what they have to do but I did get a discount on the charge for the use of oxygen!! They even charged me for the gas too, which was around 56 miles!!!!
My insurance eventually paid, a year and a half later! I had to fight tooth and nail to get these people to understand the situation. I ended up with over 20 bills from this accident. Even though I had insurance to cover it it was still my bill until they did. They would call me to set up a payment plan but I couldn’t afford it because 20 different people wanted to get paid every month. You say pay $5 bucks a month? No they don’t want that. They laugh at you when you say that’s all you can afford. They tell you to go ask your family members to loan you some money so they can get paid. I did neither. I got fed up with them and told them that if they wanted to send it to collections then go ahead, that I was sure they already had reported it to the credit agency anyways. My insurance finally paid Jan of this year.
I would have hate to seen my bill if I didn’t have insurance. Insurance companies get an “insurance rate or adjustment on medical bills but if you have no insurance you get charged the full amount. I ended up having about $72,000 in medical bills for me and my kids. I certainly don’t have that kind of money laying around.
I hate it when I hear of people using the ER for services like a headache or something that is not an emergency. That’s why the ER’s are so backed up and full.
@scatyb:
“Let all bear in mind that a society is judged not so much by the standards attained by its more affluent and privileged members as by the quality of life which it is able to assure for its weakest members. “
~H.E. Javier Perez de Cuellar
Oh yeah I’m not siding with this guy but they shouldn’t hound this lady about that guy’s bill. I’m sure they figure she knows where he is since he probably didn’t put down a address, phone number, etc.
We all know that he isn’t going to pay.
Here’s an idea, don’t let a homeless man use you as an emergency contact you nutbag….
@bellagray: Why should I waste MY time dealing with someone ELSE’S problems?
@killavanilla: Yup. The blame-the-victim-ing has started.
WOW! Arent there consequenses for debt collectors for hounding someone else for another person’s debt?
A few years ago I started getting harrassing phone calls on my cellphone for someone else’s debt (aparrently someone made up a phone # & put it on an application somewhere & that phone # happened to be to my cellphone). I had POS sleazeballs calling me day & night saying that I was someone else & that I needed to pay up or else. I ended up having to change my phone #.
@wring: No. They get sick and don’t go to a primary care dr and wait and wait and wait till it is so bad they have to go to the ER. If treated early it would be $100-200. Now at the ER it is $3000-4000. They of course do not pay it and soon there will be NO ERs because it is too costly to keep them open because no one pays. Come on. Who does not have access to $100-200 bucks to pay a bill? Yer telling me he has no friends or relatives who could not help? BTW, at one time not too long ago , I did not have coverage. I had to go to the Dr. And yes. I paid my bill. If I can do it, others can too. Stop expecting them to not be able to pay. Demand they pay SOMETHING each month. ANYTHING. Don’t tell me that there is no way they can’t pay $5 or 10 a week. Bullshit. They would just rather buy some ripple or smokes than do the right thing and pay the bill. If they cant pay then ask them to come in and mop floors or bus tables or do dishes in the hospital a few hours a week.
@Chicago7: Damn right I am against it. Canadians have to wait 9-12 months for surgery. Name ONE thing the government does well. JUST ONE! Now you actually believe that OUR federal gov can administer health care better than industry??? BTW, I have some Utah ocean front property for sale if you believe that.
@Beerad: Hospitals are not a shared public service. They are privately owned in most cases. They are businesses. They are there to make money and expand and do right by their investors. They have a right to expect payment for services rendered. BTW, in some areas, if you start the fire, YOU get the bill for the FD fighting it.
@scatyb:
So, this guy should just go off in a corner and die?
Wow.
@killavanilla:
Who sends a bill to an emergency contact?
@jwissick:
For NON-CRITICAL surgery, they have to wait UP TO 12 months. Everybody is getting the health care they need, if you talk to ACTUAL CANADIANS, rather than listening to Rush Limbaugh talk about what’s happening in Canada.
@E-Bell:
the hospital said it “seeks reimbursement through a county program for indigent adults. It does not bill patients or put them through collections.”
even by their own admission, the hospital should NOT have sent his bill to collections. unless they’re just lying to save face.
@jwissick:
Yeah, you’re right, what can the government do right? These are the same people running the military, and we all know how well that’s going.
@jwissick: “THERE IS NO RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE! NONE! Just as there is no right to food. There is no right to water. There is no right to a car…”
Can we add “air” to that list? And then cut his off? Also: CAPS usage. Definitely has lost that privilege.
I hate this country.
I’m taking a massive amount of summer classes and loaded semesters just so I can get my B.A. sooner and get the hell out of this backwards country.
Healthcare is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT. IT IS NOT JUST FOR THE RICH. THE POOR GET SICK TOO.
AGH! Will Americans ever learn?
@Buran:
No. You are right. The ‘victim’ didn’t do anything to put themselves in this position. They just told a homeless man that they know very little about that it was okay to use their name, address and phone number for emergency contact information.
Totally reasonable behavior.
I used to know this homeless guy who hung around the area my bar was in. I’d pay him $20 from time to time to do odd jobs like clean garbage cans, sweep up the back alley – menial stuff.
I’d buy him sandwiches all the time and have the cooks prep me some food to give him at the end of the night. He was a nice guy. Just lost, you know?
One night, I stepped out to talk to him and tell him I had some grub for him. When I came back in, a regular who was a cop (many of my regulars were – I was two blocks from a police station) asked me if that guy was giving me problems. I told him no and that he was basically okay.
He then told me that the week prior, they found him crying and naked sitting on the street at 4 in the morning. when they approached him, they saw why he was crying. He had stuffed a dead rat in his keester while pleasuring himself and couldn’t get it out.
My point is – YOU DON’T KNOW THESE PEOPLE.
Hell, I’d bet there are people you’ve known for 20 years that could tell you things about themselves that would absolutely freak you out.
So yeah, in a way (actually in everyway) this IS the ‘victims’ fault.
Had they not given their info and not volunteered to give info that was completely unneccessary, they would never have been in this mess.
@Chicago7:
A dumb hospital that farms out their past due bills to bill collectors.
The bill collector tries to find ANYONE who will pay.
It’s shady, no doubt, but why allow someone to use you as a reference if you don’t want to be involved?
While in a way I agree, the ‘healthcare is not a right’ crowed seems to miss an important point. While I don’t like paying addt’l in taxes for healthcare for the ‘lazy’ people (not talking about people trying to earn a living, just people milking the healthcare system), I don’t mind paying to keep myself safe.
Example (far fetched as it is), I live in Orlando and a lot of homeless people live down town. Homeless guy contracts Tuberculosis or some other infectious disease. Doesn’t get medical attention, walks by you and sneezes and you catch TB (yes, it canbe transmitted this way). You find out somehow (doctor, divine moment, etc.) that you got TB from the homeless guy. Do you think “well, healthcare is not a right, its what happens” and live with it or do you think “why the hell didn’t this guy get treatment?” Yes, I know TB isn’t curable but you get the idea.
Tax supported healthcare for people who cannot afford to do so helps more (in a lot of cases) than just that one person.
I love you guys:
“If you can’t pay, die”
“Canadians wait 9 months to get surgery’
Every time I hear anything about Amurrican health care I get a big ole’ smile on my face. I’m 24, had a HEART ATTACK and it cost me $0. I was in the ER within 15 minutes, and never, ever heard anything from the hospital regarding my bill.
Is state-sponsored health-care perfect?, nope, but I’d rather have my taxes going to save homeless people than sponsoring Marines to rape and kill Iraqi’s.
@gundark: What the fuck is wrong with you?
What did I write that was so outrageous? That it’s not shocking for a hospital to bill folks for services rendered? I actually agreed that sending the collections agency after Mary was over the line.
I guess if that makes me an “asshat,” so be it.
@LAGirl: I get it; maybe under their own policy, they shouldn’t have billed the guy, but the clear tenor of the article was that the hospital shouldn’t have tried to bill the guy at all because he was indigent – not that it got sent to collections.
@jwissick: Maybe I’m just a drooling numbskull. However, wasn’t one of the goals of the constitution to promote the general welfare? According to the dictionary welfare means:
health, happiness, or prosperity; well-being
heck, our founding fathers may not have written it in the constitution. But they told King George V of England to fuck off because they felt they had certain inalienable rights. Up to and including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Mind you in the late 1700′s healthcare was barely out of the dark ages. So maybe that’s why the hack framers forgot to include it.
How dare you presume to dictate who lives and who dies. Maybe us poor folk just just put ourselves out of YOUR misery and kill ourselves right now. That make you feel any better asshole?
@killavanilla: None of that changes the fact that they shouldn’t be giving bill collectors emergency contact information.
For all those who think we have the best healthcare in the world, please explain to me why our life expectancy is exceed by about 36 other countries? And don’t say anything about obesisty, because that epidemic is now, and those people haven’t started dying yet. That will make our ranking much lower in approximately 10-20 years.
And also if you use the example of the only thing we are number 1 in according to the WHO, which is timiliness, please realize that is the only ranking that is actually based of consumer surveys. So since you have been brainwashed to think that we have the best healthcare in the world, and you also think all other countries have to wait 3 years to get their cold checked out, realize the US citizens surveyed have a highly slanted result due to the propaganda.
@Phildawg:
It’s simple, really.
Our healthcare system is built around treating disease, not preventing them.
We need a paradigm shift here. Stop focusing only on treating the sick and start working on ways to prevent illness.
Another possible reason is that our population is made up of people from other cultures in far greater numbers than anywhere else.
Simply put, nothing is more american than people who have roots elsewhere.
Thus, we inherit the good and the bad, genetics wise.
@Rectilinear Propagation:
And how do we know that he didn’t put them down as a credit reference as well?
We don’t.
we simply don’t have enough information.
Paint 8,400 house numbers with donated paint. Problem solved
@killavanilla: And what difference would it make if he did put them down as a credit reference? How does that make them, in any way, responsible for the bill?
CHICAGO7: The hospital most likely sent the bill to the “Emergency Contact” because the homeless patient didn’t list a residential address or phone number where he could be reached.. obviously.. because he’s homeless. In cases like that, where a homeless patient cannot be reached, charity care advisors will attempt to reach the emergency contact individuals (in the hopes that the emergency contact can get ahold of the patient) to try and resolve the account without it going into bad debt. It’s in a facility’s best interests to resolve accounts as quickly as possible without getting a collections agency involved. Obviously if they attempted to reach the emergency contact via mail and a phone call and didn’t receive a response, then the account would routinely age in their system and eventually be turned over to a collections agency.
LAGIRL: If the hospital attempts to resolve the bill through their indigent/charity programs by contacting the patient (or in this case, contacting the emergency person to try and reach the homeless patient) and the patient does not respond or communicate with the billing office, then yes, the account goes to collections. But hospitals aren’t going to just write off thousands of dollars because they can’t reach a patient, even if they suspect the patient does not have the means to pay. Due to auditing purposes, you have to verify all of that information with the patient and it needs to be notated and documented in the billing department before bills can be written off. In order to get that information, hospitals need to get ahold of the patients. In order to get ahold of the patients, hospitals will mail correspondence and make phone calls IN ADDITION to the routine statements/bills that generate and are mailed out. If the patient doesn’t give a home address or a phone number (and/or tells the ER registration unit that he is homeless), the hospital will attempt to reach the emergency contact to try and qualify the patient for charity/indigent care.
@guymandude:
Yeah, sort of.
Credit references tie you to the decision.
Who cares? The point is, this is what you get when you let someone you don’t know real well use you as a reference.
Like it, don’t like – not important.
We don’t have access to the forms as they were filled out, so we don’t know enough to truly be able to figure out why they received a bill….
It’s likely that the people who they tried to bill don’t know either.
Sometimes I wish I could vote for succession. That way all those that think everything has a price tag and no one should get off free and we have the best healthcare can live in their corner of the world. They can have millions of babies because few would live to adulthood under the same formula.
The rest of us could live in peace believing that everyone deserves a chance to live, healthy and happy.
Problems solved.
This is prime example of why people should have their own 900 number to give as a contact number.