Upon experiencing excruciating stomach pain one night three years ago, Nicole Briggs visited a freestanding ER in the Denver suburbs, where she was diagnosed with appendicitis and advised immediate surgery.
She rushed to Swedish Medical Center, but before that, she made sure it took her insurance. Briggs thought she was covered when the hospital said yes. She recalled, “I thought [that meant] the anesthesiologist takes my insurance that the surgeon [does], that the nurse, you know, that that’s all part of the same deal.”
However, after two months of the surgery, she was surprised to receive a medical bill for $4,727 from her surgeon, Dr. Emmett McGuire. Like many doctors at Swedish Medical hospital, Dr. McGuire practiced independently and he did not take her insurance. She declined to pay the medical bill.
Two years later, a collection firm slapped a lien on her home, which means it would block her from selling her house unless she pays off the debt.
Briggs was astonished. She said, “It’s really scary. This is all we have, and to think that it could all be taken away, because some doctor doesn’t feel like taking anyone’s insurance is — it’s just so wrong.”
NBC’s KUSA has worked for several months on surprise medical bills and found that since 2017, Credit Systems International had put liens on 170 homes. The agency declined to comment when NBC New contacted.
NBC News also found similar cases due to unpaid medical bills in New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Vermont. Surprise medical bills can lead to such liens.
According to a recent poll by Kaiser Family Foundation, four in 10 Americans have received surprise medical bills.
Dr. Ashish Jha, a health policy professor at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, said, “I find this really unconscionable. This is really a failure of our system to stick people with these kinds of bills that really have no justification whatsoever.”
Briggs said that she asked over and over again whether she was fully covered when she got to the hospital for her surgery three years ago. She added that she might have asked the hospital more than a dozen times. She has even testified in the state legislature, requesting to make it illegal for collection forms to garnish wages for unpaid medical bills, which she said has crippled her life. She said, “They all made money off of me. They made money off of me during one of the worst days of my life.”
