According to a New York Times investigation, Providence trained staff to pressure patients to pay their bills, without telling them they might be eligible for financial assistance. And if they didn’t pay, the bills went to debt collectors.
: Providence is supposed to post in all of its hospitals in Alaska — and this is a federal requirement, this is under the Affordable Care Act — they’re supposed to inform patients about the availability of financial assistance. They’re supposed to make it very clear and very easy to understand. In Alaska, their charity care policy says that anyone who makes under or at 200% of the federal poverty level should get free care. That’s their own financial assistance policy.
Providence in 2019, under the direction of the Chief Financial Officer, made this change where they stopped writing off the debts of Medicaid patients. And instead, they sent those Medicaid patients to debt collectors.
The thing that they are not saying, the piece of information that’s being left out of that, is that an executive in 2019, so in December of 2019, sent a warning, like raised a red flag to other Providence executives, warning them that the changes to how Medicaid patients were being treated were producing a lot of harm.
And the baby that she had given birth to died after five days in the hospital. And when she was discharged, and went home and she’s grieving the loss of her son, these phone calls started from Providence. And she says she just remembers just this cold panic, because Providence employees told her that her bill was $125,000. So at the time, that was about four times what she made in a year.
Instead, they, according to her, pushed her to pay half the amount. And then on other calls, she was offered a payment plan, she said. And, you know, she said something that really struck me in our interview, she said it was like they were following some script, she said like robots. And to me, what was so gutting in some ways about that is that, you know, Providence employees had been given a script to collect money from patients.
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