An investigation by 9News and The Colorado Sun, in partnership with the Colorado News Collaborative and KFF Health News, shows how UCHealth filed more than 15 thousand lawsuits against patients from 2019 through 2023.
John Ingold, a healthcare reporter at The Colorado Sun, was part of the collaborative reporting project which showed that UCHealth rarely puts its name on the lawsuits, rather the name of a collections agency appears.
John Ingold: So UCHealth, before the COVID pandemic, used to sue under its name. And then when COVID hit back in early 2020 here in Colorado, UCHealth, like a lot of hospital systems, took a pause on their debt collection practices for the first six months of the pandemic.
And then once that pause ended, the lawsuits didn't really return in UCHealth's name. It sort of looked like UCHealth maybe was continuing to not sue, but instead, what had happened was UCHealth started using the name of debt collectors to sue in these lawsuits. And, to be a little bit more technical about it, UCHealth would say that they assign this debt to the debt collector. So, they don't relinquish ownership of the debt - the debt is still owned by UCHealth, it’s money that is still owed to UCHealth, but they would say that they have assigned this to the debt collector, that the debt collector is now in control of the debt collection practice, and therefore the debt collector - which often has these really sort of generic kind of sounding names, Collection Center, Inc., or Credit Service Company, the debt collector is putting their names as the plaintiffs in these lawsuits.
So, if you're a patient and you get sued, the lawsuit's going to say Credit Service Company v. John Ingold or whoever, which can make it a little bit difficult to understand: ‘well, wait, where's this debt coming from? What bill is this related to? Who's actually behind this?’
Maeve Conran: Well, let's talk about some of the patients because I think it's easy to forget when we're talking about such huge numbers that these are people behind all of that. And real-life stories of people dealing with not just medical issues, but now being sued.
So let's talk about somebody that you spoke to, Cathy Woods-Sullivan. What's Cathy's story?
Ingold: So I think Cathy's story is probably pretty typical for the way these lawsuits go. Dating back to, let's say 2016, Cathy's husband passed away - he had been dealing with kidney failure for a long time.
The family had been receiving a lot of medical bills during that time. They were covered by Medicaid, but they would still see these bills coming through. They had two teenage daughters, they also had medical bills. And then Cathy one day had what turned out to be a panic attack. As you can imagine, dealing with all of this, the stress and the grief of her husband's passing, ended up going to UCHealth, University of Colorado Hospital, out there in Aurora.
And then this bill added into the river of bills that were sort of flowing through her house. And somehow this one kind of got lost in the shuffle. She would call UCHealth and say, ‘do I need to be paying for this?’ And they would kind of look it up in their billing system. And she says they would tell her, ‘no, that'll be covered.’ Or, you know, ‘you have insurance.’ And then eventually she ended up being sued over this bill and it was not a lot of money, it was 1600 bucks, but that's fairly typical for how a lawsuit goes. They're not these huge numbers that you would generally think of, they actually tend to be kind of in the small four figures very often.
So, she ended up being sued by a credit service company acting on behalf of UCHealth. It wasn't entirely clear when she got the lawsuit who was serving her or who was suing her. The process server served her daughter and not her, her teenage daughter, who was home alone at the time.
She eventually entered into a payment plan to try to pay it off. And she just wanted to be done with this. She wanted to be just debt free, just rid of this, this hassle and this stress.
So she kind of started looking through her house to find out what she potentially had that she could sell to raise enough money to pay this off all in one, and what she ended up finding was her wedding ring. And she pawned it, and that gave her enough money that she could pay off the debt.
Conran: There was another woman who was featured in this investigation, Lorena Sanchez, who was in a car accident in Colorado Springs and received a huge bill that was actually reduced, but, a billing mistake got her involved, and she was sued by UCHealth as well. Tell us Lorena's story.
Ingold: I think her story shows the importance of why is it worthwhile having transparency about what's happening here? Why is it worthwhile knowing that UCHealth is actually the one who's behind these lawsuits?
So Lorena was traveling on I-25 with her family heading south around Colorado Springs, and some deer jumped out from the side of the road, caused the car to spin. She ended up being taken to the emergency room for a couple of hours, maybe three hours at most, a few standard scans to make sure she was okay, and then sent on her way.
Now, she didn't have insurance, so she ended up receiving a bill for this visit for $24,000, which would be what we would sort of refer to as the chargemaster price, kind of the sticker price. It’s generally thought to be the price that no one pays.
Eventually, she applied for financial assistance and received a letter from UCHealth that said 'your bill had been reduced by 73%.' So now, $24,000 becomes roughly $6,000 that she owes.
And then the next month, though, she does get a bill from UCHealth, and it still has the $24,000 figure on it. So she starts kind of going back and forth with them to say, ‘well, you said I don't owe this. I don't want to start paying a bill that I don't owe. Let's get the bill number correct.’ This goes on long enough and eventually, she gets sued and the lawsuit is over that $24,000 number.
Now, during the course of lawsuit apparently, UCHealth did an audit of her account and there was a billing mistake. So they did, in the lawsuit, eventually, they told the credit company and the credit company reduced the amount they were suing over.
But again, this sort of shows like she got sued for money that she didn’t owe. She got sued for money that UCHealth said she didn't owe. How often is this actually happening? How often is a patient getting a bill over something or a lawsuit over a bill that they're still disputing? Or it's an incorrectly billed amount. It's why transparency ends up being important here.
And without UCHealth having its name on the lawsuit in a way that journalists or consumer advocates can actually look at and see and know where this lawsuit is coming from, it makes it really hard to know that this very large hospital system, the largest hospital system that's operating in Colorado, to know what they're actually doing and whether they're doing it right.
Conran: And there are huge implications for this. I mean, both Cathy and Lorena suffered extreme stress and health issues as a result of the stress over these lawsuits. Lorena has said that she'd be very reluctant to seek out medical care because of her experience with this. I mean, this has implications long beyond the financial aspect of this as well.
Ingold: Just around medical debt there's been research that's been done about how medical debt can make health conditions worse for individuals. And then you mentioned exactly the public health component of this. Cathy was in a car accident not too long ago. And was banged up, was hurt, and probably should have gone to the hospital to get checked out, but told the first responders on scene like, ‘no, do not take me to the hospital.’
Lorena, she does try to seek out treatment through alternative medicine sources. She is a U.S. citizen, but she's originally from Mexico, so she will sometimes go to Mexico to receive medical treatment.
But in terms of just going and seeing a primary care doctor or getting something checked out when you need to do that, they are both very, very afraid of incurring new debt and having to go through these experiences again. And they warn others to not go to the hospital. Don't put yourself in this position. And so when you have these kinds of practices, the message somehow kind of starts getting around a little bit that maybe the hospital is not a safe place for you to go, financially, and that ends up then having public health consequences.
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