More Hospitals Beginning to Demand Payment Upfront Before Administering Patient Treatments

Hospitals are changing the way they operate — no pun intended — and it’s putting some patients’ health at risk. It used to be common practice for hospitals and other medical facilities to calculate costs and send bills…

IJR SyndicatedMay 13, 20244 min read

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considers an emergency may differ from how the term might be defined by someone experiencing severe pain.

“We need those patients who are able to pay to do so,” Leslie Taylor, a spokeswoman for University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which owns one general hospital in Arkansas, told the Journal.

That hospital has in the past rescheduled some patients’ procedures until after they pay up, although they say they only do so with the approval of doctors.

Health Care consulting company Kodiak Solutions told the Journal that 23 percent of patient bills are now being paid before treatment is provided, up from 20 percent only two years ago.

That may not seem like a huge increase, but considering that about half of American adults say they don’t have more than $500 available to pay for sudden medical issues, according to the Journal, it’s a trend that could cause serious problems for many.

The Journal spotlighted two cases of people affected by pay-in-advance policies, both of which had happy endings.

The first was that of Heather Miconi, whose daughter needed adenoid and tonsil surgery to help her breathe — not an emergency, but obviously important.

Miconi already works three jobs and has a high-deductible insurance policy, so she needed $2,000 to pay for the procedure in advance. She had to start a GoFundMe to raise the funds.

The good news in Miconi’s case is that the fundraiser has already brought in nearly $10,000. Miconi wrote on the site that she’ll use the extra to pay down medical bills that have been accumulating interest since her daughter’s 2021 hospitalization.

“This has lifted a huge burden from our lives and I am forever grateful,” she wrote.

The other example cited by the Journal was that of Blake Young, who needed a heart screening last November. He paid $3,600 in advance, only to find out later that he’d been overcharged by almost 200 percent, and the hospital owed him $2,546.

It took Young over six months to get his Money back, and he had to involve the Better Business Bureau to do it.

The hospital, CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, did eventually offer Young an apology — and, eventually, a check.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.