Nonprofit hospitals act as medical debt litigators
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Tax-exempt hospitals are again raising eyebrows over how they harass patients, often the poorest, in court by trying to recoup medical debts.
Driving the news: ProPublica and MLK50 published a deep dive yesterday on Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, a $2 billion not-for-profit and faith-based hospital system in Tennessee that has filed more than 8,300 lawsuits against patients over the past 5 years.
- One of the patients featured in the story made less than $14,000 last year, and Methodist is suing her for more than $33,000. The hospital operates in the second-poorest large metropolitan area in the nation.
- Methodist obtained wage garnishment orders in almost half of the cases it filed between 2014 and 2018, meaning that the debtor's employer was required to send the court a portion of the worker's after-tax income.
Between the lines: As we wrote this week, hospitals taking patients to court is both common and longstanding.
- And when hospitals don’t get what they want from collections or the courts, they occasionally seize patients' tax refunds.
The bottom line: Not-for-profit hospitals market themselves as charities, but they act more like for-profit peers — renewing questions of whether those organizations’ tax exemptions are justified.
- Coincidentally, the American Hospital Association released a paper Thursday touting hospitals' community benefits, but the paper has some of the same flaws as prior analyses.
What we're watching: These practices have drawn the ire of Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is now chairman of the powerful Finance Committee.
- "Such hospitals seem to forget that tax exemption is a privilege, not a right. In addition to withholding financial assistance to low-income patients, they give top executives salaries on par with their for-profit counterparts," Grassley wrote in a 2017 op-ed.
Go deeper: Hospitals are swimming in cash
