Virginia hospitals and medical providers sought to collect $1.4 billion in medical debt through over 1 million lawsuits against patients between 2010 and 2024, according to a recent study on medical debt.<\/p>\n
This is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive medical debt study, according to Julie Havlak, manager of research and communications at Patient Rights Advocate, one of the study authors. She said that makes it difficult to compare with other states, but the outcome in Virginia hints that national numbers could be much worse than researchers previously thought.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn previous states, people were shocked when we found 10,000, and I think the next largest report found that hospitals in New York state filed 80,000 lawsuits,\u201d Havlak said. She was referencing a 2020 report<\/a> from nonprofit Community Service Society of New York, which tracked lawsuits brought by nonprofit hospitals since 2015 and state-run facilities since 2019.<\/p>\n The Virginia study was done by researchers at George Washington University Law School, Stanford University School of Medicine and Patient Rights Advocate, a nonprofit focused on healthcare price transparency. Havlak said the team manually reviewed and coded all medical debt lawsuits filed in Virginia circuit and district courts in that time frame. Researchers matched records to plaintiffs, and found 1.15 million court actions and 403,924 garnishment actions, which is much higher than they expected.<\/p>\n The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, which represents multiple hospital systems named in the report \u2014 including Sentara Health and VCU Health \u2014 has refuted the study, saying it relied on misconstrued data. In a statement to The Virginian-Pilot, Vice President of Communications Julian Walker referred to Patient Rights Advocate \u201cas an agenda-driven organization with a track record of making misleading claims about hospitals.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \u201cVirginia hospitals have a well-documented record of making significant investments in expanding access to care and providing free and discounted care to low-income individuals across the Commonwealth,\u201d Walker wrote in a statement. \u201cEach year, Virginia hospitals incur hundreds of millions in bad debt from unpaid medical bills.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawsuits<\/p>\n Many of these lawsuits \u201coriginated from hidden prices, predatory contracts, and opaque billing,\u201d according to the report. The researchers encountered patients who sold their possessions, took out high-interest loans, struggled to pay for rent and groceries and avoided future medical care as a result.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is necessary medical care that patients never knew what the cost was going to be, and never had the opportunity to give financial consent, and after they were sued, most of the patients didn\u2019t understand what they were being sued for,\u201d Havlak said. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge imbalance of power here, because the hospital has the information.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonprofit hospital-owned providers were responsible for over half of the lawsuits against patients in Virginia. The study asserts that Sentara Health, a not-for-profit healthcare delivery system, was the health system that brought the most lawsuits in the state with over 106,000 court actions during over 14 years. Sentara is one of the largest health systems in the Mid-Atlantic region<\/a> and operates 12 hospitals in Virginia and North Carolina. The study said the healthcare system charged patients prices that varied by as much as 77 times across its hospitals.\n<\/p>\n