Hospital-Billing Firm Denies High-Pressure Collection Tactics

Accretive Health, a private firm contracted by several nonprofit hospital systems to secure patient payments, said it is working to address issues raised by Minnesota’s attorney general about its collection tactics but denied that it exerts bedside pressure on patients to pay up or risk foregoing treatment, Bloomberg writes.

The Chicago-based company said Attorney General Lori Swanson’s allegations that Accretive used high-pressure collection methods at hospitals run by Minnesota’s Fairview Health Services “grossly distort and mischaracterize” the firm’s work and called claims that it denied access to care “flatly untrue.”

Ms. Swanson’s office is suing Accretive over its collection practices in Minnesota hospitals. Congressman Pete Stark, a California Democrat, called on federal health officials to investigate the company, Bloomberg also reported.

In other news, a Columbus, Ohio, nonprofit Catholic hospital, Mount Carmel, sued 1,600 patients from 2009 to 2011, most for not paying their medical bills, though not all were poor, according to NPR.

One mother of three, who was uninsured and whose income was just $25,000 a year, was told by a debt collector that the hospital could garnish 25 percent of her wages, said NPR. However, she “was likely eligible for free care under the Mount Carmel Health System’s financial assistance policy, which offers medical care at no charge for patients earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level,” the report said.

Mount Carmel says it approves 90 percent of the completed charity-care applications it receives each month so those patients can get help from the hospital or the state.

But on average, according to a Congressional Budget Office study, nonprofit hospitals provide only a little more free care than for-profit hospitals.