NC treasurer’s report critical of how hospitals bill poor

The group blasted the news conference as a “public relations stunt” by Folwell at a time when hospital staff is stretched thin while handling record hospitalizations during COVID-19.

Folwell, a Republican reelected in 2020, also released a report in October that found a majority of the state’s largest nonprofit hospital systems failed to provide a monetary charity care that exceed 60% of the value of the system’s tax breaks they had received in recent years.

Wednesday’s report, which Folwell said was peer-reviewed by Rice University researchers, found that some nonprofit hospitals in fiscal year 2019 billed $149.2 million to poor patients who should have qualified for charity care under the hospitals’ own policies. But that covered fewer than 20% of the state’s nonprofit hospitals, the report said.

Citing 2019 federal tax filings, an average 12% to 29% of bad debt for nonprofit hospitals in the state should have been charity care, while the national average, last recorded in 2017, is 10%, according to report findings. The pandemic likely is making the problem of patient debt worse, the report said.

The report also alleges that hospitals seeking to collect unpaid bills sometimes do so through damaging credit scores or suing patients. Some hospitals also have encouraged patients to open “medical credit cards” that charge interest to pay bills, the report said.