Stop Me Before I Vote Again

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/nyregion/study-finds-new-york-hospitals-flout-charity-rules.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

it delights me to read about agressive debt collection by hospitals in particular leading non profit "teaching hospitals "

we pwogs often like to lead ourselves to believe naked profiteering is the root of bourgeois evil
knock that out and ....

well .... take a look at this anecdote:

NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital
a paragon of elite health care utterly free of any notion of profiteering

now collecting " $50.2 million from the state’s so-called Indigent Care Pool
for people .. who have no insurance and cannot pay their bills." each year

despite this rather handsome bribe to be charitable
doesn't our grand humane institution here
proceed to squeeze one Hope Rubel a women without insurance for unpaid bills ..
that after already and illegaly forcing ms Rubel to deplete "her savings to pay $17,000
for surgery to remove a tumor"

in the upshot Hope R was hit with :
"... $88,000 in additional hospital bills ...."
Eventually the hospital sued her for the money. "

fyi:

"Hospitals are not legally barred from seeking judgments or liens, but must first offer an aid application, help the patient complete it, and wait while it is pending. Instead, many hospitals turn to collection agencies, and sue when that fails. The unpaid bills — typically reflecting much higher rates than what insurers pay — are then treated as the equivalent of charity care. "

read the rest ....at nyt link above

and a more general study here
http://www.cssny.org/userimages/downloads/IncentivizingPatientFinancialAssistanceFeb2012.pdf

i'll leave you to it with this only from the state investigation :

"hospitals that reported they had spent nothing on financial aid, or had filed hundreds of liens against patients’ homes, were allowed to collect without questions from the charity care pool, which distributes more than $1 billion a year. "

all these non profit helping institutions no doubt were grinding exceeding fine
simply to meet rock bottom merit based payments to their teams of professional healers ....