Back in 2005, [Manny] Lanza was diagnosed with arteriovenous malformation, a serious brain condition. He had been working 50 hours a week at a fast food restaurant, but his job was considered part-time and his employer did not offer him health insurance. He was referred to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan for treatment, where they reportedly refused to perform a needed procedure unless he was insured.

Manny’s family attempted to enroll him in Medicaid, but the delay in treatment proved deadly. In 2005, at the age of 24, Manny died in his bedroom at home from causes related to his brain disorder.” (full article here.)

At the time Manny died, New York hospitals were receiving $1 billion every year from the state to care for uninsured and underinsured patients. But there were no conditions attached to that money—they didn’t have to offer free or discounted care to actual patients, and they didn’t have to tell them about financial assistance.

Manny’s Law, passed in 2007, now requires New York hospitals to notify patients of charity care upfront.

Non-profit hospitals get tax breaks, and they’re expected to provide “benefit to the community”—including charity care—in return.

But despite Congressional investigations, a prevalence of stories in the press, and similar laws in a handful of states, a new report released this week from The Access Project and Community Catalyst shows non-profit hospitals still failing to inform patients in need about charity care.

Congress, in the recently-passed federal health care reform law, inserted a provision requiring non-profit hospitals to establish clear financial assistance policies—in writing—that specify eligibility criteria and widely publicize these policies. It also prohibits hospitals from taking extraordinary collection actions before making a reasonable effort to determine if patients are eligible for financial assistance

That’s good news for people who find themselves in Manny’s position: uninsured or underinsured, needing health care they know they can’t afford.  But is the problem solved?

Our report suggests it isn’t. The Access Project wanted to know whether patients who needed hospital care and weren’t able to pay could easily find information about charity care.

Using hospital websites and phone calls, researchers surveyed 99 randomly selected non-profit, AHA-member hospitals in the summer of 2009 to see whether hospitals were complying with the AHA’s voluntary guidelines on hospital charity care. Did hospitals:

  • –Make information on hospital-based charity care policies and other known programs of financial assistance available to the public?
  • –Communicate this information to patients in a way that is easy to understand, culturally appropriate, and in the most prevalent languages used in their communities?
  • –Have understandable written policies to help patients determine if they qualify for public assistance programs or hospital-based assistance programs?
The results were pretty grim. Though 85 hospitals mentioned the availability of charity care, fewer than half of these (42) provided application forms, and only about a quarter of the hospitals (26) provided information about who qualified for charity care. Moreover, only about one-third (34) provided information in a language other than English.

And that’s just one survey. From California to Texas to North Carolina, surveys show that hospital notice and provision of charity care is uneven. While it’s true many hospitals do exemplary work to reach out and meet community needs, others just aren’t pulling their weight.

The new requirements for non-profit hospitals go into effect this year.  But given these results, it seems like hospitals have a long way to go to comply.

(Next week, we’ll look at the hospital industry’s response to the report.)

—Jessica Curtis, director, Hospital Accountability Project