Sunday, November 08, 2009
Editorial: Carilion makes charity strides
The nonprofit hospital has expanded efforts to identify patients who can't afford to pay.
From the RoundTable blog
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As a nonprofit hospital, Carilion Clinic has obligations to the community that it serves.
Until last year, Carilion officials thought one way of fulfilling that obligation was hounding people with unpaid medical bills in court.
In a way, those officials were correct. If the hospital allowed patients who can afford care to get away without paying for it, those costs simply shift to everyone else.
But, as a series of articles by The Roanoke Times' Laurence Hammack revealed last year, the hospital was not just going after those who could afford to pay.
Every week, the health care giant was taking dozens of people to court -- so many people that Roanoke General District Court set aside a day every week just to deal with nonpayment claims brought by the hospital.
Between 2003 and 2007, Carilion accounted for 40 percent of the total judgments in that court.
In reaction to the blistering criticism that followed those stories, Carilion changed its charity care policy and implemented measures to ensure that it did not take people who should have qualified for free care to court over unpaid bills.
Hammack published a follow-up article last Sunday strongly suggesting Carilion's efforts have been successful.
Between January and September of 2008, Carilion received more than 10,000 judgments in bad debt cases. During the same period in 2009, only 2,525 judgments were filed -- a decrease of 76 percent. At the same time, Carilion has increased the amount it spends on charity care.
According to Carilion spokesman Eric Earnhart, the tremendous drop in bad debt caseload is the result of an expanded charity care policy implemented last February and use of a credit database to identify indebted patients who should have qualified for charity care.
Carilion deserves much praise for the turnaround -- though the tremendous drop in caseload does make you wonder just how many low-income patients with no money to pay expensive health care bills were taken to court, and perhaps forced into bankruptcy.
Still, it's clear that Carilion Clinic is making a real attempt, with genuine success, to provide more charity care and to pursue fewer people who can't afford to pay their bills. That's worth celebrating.
