Medical debt is putting some Connecticut residents into dire financial situations.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Katy Golvala to discuss her article written with Jenna Carlesso and Noam Levey, “Baffling. Frustrating. Frightening. What it’s like to be sued over medical debt in Connecticut,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read their story here.
WSHU: Hi, Katy. In the past year, you and your colleagues talked to more than three dozen Connecticut residents who've been sued over unpaid bills by the hospitals and doctors. They've called the experience baffling, frustrating, and frightening. Let's start with Christine Wood. What was her case?
KG: Yeah, sure. So, Christine Wood got weight loss surgery in 2022 and before getting it, she says she really tried to understand if she could afford it, and she claims that she asked her insurer several times how much it would cost her out of pocket, and that she was told $5,000 and she thought, you know, what, I have $5,000 in savings, I can afford this right now. And her weight was causing her physical pain and discomfort, and she was hoping that surgery could help with that. So she went ahead, she paid the $5,000, she got the surgery, and then months later she received another bill from Bristol Hospital for $12,000, and she panicked. This bill was more than she and her husband made combined in a month. She did not have that in savings. She says she never would have gotten the surgery had she known that it actually would have cost her nearly 20 grand, and her insurer, Aetna, claimed that the lifetime benefits for her specific plan for weight loss surgery were $15,000 max, so whatever the hospital charged over and above that, she'd be responsible for. Eventually, Bristol Hospital sued her for that balance, and now she is on a payment plan, paying $150 a month, though she admits that she's run into some financial struggles over the past year, and can't always afford to make that payment. The hospital did eventually place a lien on her home, and she says she tried, you know, she tried to understand what this health care would have cost her, and still, in the end, she ended up with a lawsuit.
WSHU: And she's not the only one who has had a lien placed on the property while they've been in a payment plan. You have the story of some other person who felt she had taken care of everything. She was on a payment plan, and then all of a sudden there's a lien.
KG: That's right. So Deneen Brown, who went to Norwalk Hospital, she went to the emergency room there a few times. She is also confused about how she ended up with a bill. Her understanding was, if you have insurance, you shouldn't end up with a $7,000 ER bill. She went to the emergency room a few times and was eventually diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, so those symptoms were sending her to the emergency room a few times over the course of the year. She got a $7,000 bill, and Deneen is like that person in the friend group who's the most responsible, who's always on top of everything. She takes a lot of pride in having a very good credit score, having all her accounts in place, and so when she got the bill, she tried to get it reduced, she tried to explain to them to figure something out, she tried to see if she could qualify for hospital financial assistance. She was told no, and so eventually she said, "You know what? If I owe this, I'm going to pay it. So she agreed to a payment plan of $50 a month, and then the following month the hospital placed a lien on her home, and she says she never would have settled had she known that that was a possibility.
WSHU: Wow. Now let's talk about the fact that there's supposed to be programs to help patients with unpaid bills. What are the different players in the field talking about? What were they saying about this?
KG: Yeah, so the hospitals say that, you know, they, they do things like if you're getting an elective procedure, they have financial counselors reach out beforehand and talk to you about how much it's going to cost and how you can cover the payments. They say that they have financial assistance programs for people who make below a certain income, but what we found from talking to patients is that sometimes those tools are very difficult to access, and, and maybe sometimes they don't exactly get rolled out in the way they're meant to.
WSHU: Now, talking about getting people out of this situation, the state, with a lot of fanfare, talked about setting up a program to pay off medical debt. I remember the governor was involved. What has happened there?
KG: Yeah, that program has been helpful to many Connecticut residents. I think by the latest estimates over 160,000 people have gotten their medical debt canceled through this program, and how it's set up is the state connected with an organization called Undue Medical Debt that buys medical debt for cents on the dollar.
WSHU: That's a nonprofit, right?
KG: That's a nonprofit, correct. And so basically what Connecticut did is it put ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) dollars towards canceling medical debt, for you know, over 160,000 residents. You do have to qualify based on income, and the hospital or medical provider you went to see has to opt into the program.
WSHU: In the meantime, people are still experiencing frustration and fright as they have to deal with unpaid medical bills.
KG: I think that's right, and you know there is some good news here. The state's biggest hospitals have, have really slowed down, and some altogether stopped suing people over the past five years. So we looked at data from 2019 to 2024 on court cases for medical for unpaid medical bills, and those have gone down significantly, and so that's a great sign, but just because people aren't getting sued doesn't mean they're not holding on to medical debt and dealing with some of the issues that the people in this story really brought to light, so roughly four in 10 adults in the US have some kind of medical or dental debt, and to some extent all of those people are dealing with the issues that that arose in the conversations we had.
