She looks like all the other staff in the ER. Carrying a tablet, smiling nicely, she sits down next to you and starts asking your name and other information. But she’s not a nurse, an aide or even a doctor. She’s a debt collector. And you may even be denied treatment if you can’t pay something right at that moment.
And that may not be the worst thing.
Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued Accretive Health, an aggressive debt-collection agency, after an employee left behind a laptop with personal information on about 23,500 patients in a rental car last July.
Swanson's lawsuit alleges that Accretive Health's access to patient records violates federal privacy laws, according to a story by Jessica Silver-Greenberg.
Accretive gained access to “sensitive patient data through contracts with the hospitals and numerically scored patients’ risk of hospitalization and medical complexity, graded their “frailty,” compiled per-patient profit and loss reports, and identified patients deemed to be ‘outliers,” according to the press release from the Minnesota Office of the Attorney General.
Other data breaches have occurred all over the country, but most have come from hospital workers’ carelessness. Now the public has debt collector breaches to worry about.
As the NYT story reports, a little-known practice of hospital companies embedding debt collectors in their facilities is now coming to light.
Debt collectors are becoming more and more aggressive (some might say assaultive), as they look to get money back for their clients. Dealing with a debt collector can expose individuals to harassing calls, threats and the use of obscene language. Worse still – a collector may embarrass you by contacting your employer, family or neighbors.
Silver-Greenberg said in her story that Lisa Lindsay, an Illinois woman recovering from breast cancer, was actually arrested and put in jail briefly over an unpaid $280 bill that wasn’t even hers.
To be fair, collection agency clients like hospitals face financial pressure as healthcare costs escalate and payment rates from Medicare, Medicaid and private health insurance companies decrease, according to Silver-Greenberg.
She notes that a decade-old federal law requires hospitals to provide emergency medical care to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay, and that forces them to take on tens of billions of dollars in bad debt each year.
In 2010, hospitals were left with a whopping $39.3 billion in unpaid bills, adding up to 5.6 percent of their total expenses, according to the American Hospital Association.
As a growing number of hospitals struggle under a glut of unpaid bills, they turn to companies like Accretive. And debt collectors are not only allowed into hospital rooms and ERs, according to NYT. They can come right up to you and ask for payment as you’re checking in for treatment.
Edited by
Braden Becker
