http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/022704I.shtmlThere's been a lot of whining about health care recently: the shocking cost of insurance, the mounting reluctance of employers to share that cost, the challenge--should you be so lucky as to have insurance--of finding a doctor your insurance company will deign to reimburse, and so forth. But let's look at the glass half full for a change. Despite the growing misfit between health care costs and personal incomes, it is not yet illegal to be sick.
Not quite yet, anyway, though the trend is clear: Hospitals are increasingly resorting to brass knuckle tactics to collect overdue bills from indigent patients. Take the case of Martin Bushman, an intermittently insured mechanic with diabetes who, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, had run up a $579 debt to Carle Hospital in Champaign-Urbana. When he failed to appear for a court hearing on his debt rather than miss a day of work, he was arrested and hit with $2,500 bail. Arrests for missed court dates, which the hospitals whimsically refer to as "body attachments," are on the rise throughout the country. Again, on the half full side, we should be thankful that the bodies attached by hospitals cannot yet be used as sources of organs for transplants.
Mindful of their status as nonprofit charitable institutions, hospitals used to be relatively congenial creditors. My uninsured companion of several years would simply work out a payment arrangement--on the scale of about $25 a month for life--and go on consuming medical care without the least concern for his freedom. No longer, and it's not just the dodgier, second-rate hospitals that are relying on the police as collection agents. Yale-New Haven Hospital, for example, has obtained sixty-five arrest warrants for delinquent debtors in the last three years.
Of course, if you work for Yale-New Haven, it's not your body that gets "attached."
On a recent visit to Yale hospital workers, I met Tawana Marks, a registrar at the hospital, who had the misfortune to also be admitted as a patient. Unsurprisingly, her hospital-supplied health insurance failed to cover her hospital-incurred bill, so Marks now has her paycheck garnished by her own employer--a condition of debt servitude reminiscent of early twentieth century company towns.
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