Willie Mae White began worrying how she'd pay the $36,224 bill from Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center a few weeks after having emergency brain surgery. She lived off Social Security and food stamps after decades working as a housekeeper. So she was thrilled when Bayview informed her in writing that her bill would be forgiven, at least in part. The hospital had little to lose, since it can recover its costs of free and unpaid care under a unique state program. Instead, the hospital sued her 15 months later to collect the bill. Fearing she'd lose her Waverly rowhouse and too sick to defend herself in court, she agreed to pay $500 right away plus $50 a month. At that rate, it would have taken her 59 years to get out of debt.
"It wasn't fair. But what could I do? I said, 'Lord, it's in your hands,' " said White, 66, who remains too weak to work.
"All my life, I try to do the right thing. I have been working since I was a child."
On Wednesday, two months after The Baltimore Sun asked Johns Hopkins officials about her case, the hospital wiped out the debt and agreed to pay White $2,207.Even though her debt was resolved, Willie Mae White's case illustrates the ordeal that some needy people face even though Maryland's hospital regulation system was designed to protect them.
Three decades ago, Maryland officials devised a novel system - now the only one of its kind - in which a state agency sets hospital rates for all patients. It was designed in part to guarantee hospital care whether patients could afford it or not. Hospitals received $921 million last year to cover costs of providing free and unpaid care, according to the most recent state records, and all hospital patients in Maryland contribute through the rates they pay.
But an eight-month investigation by The Sun found that over the past five years some of Maryland's 46 nonprofit hospitals have received millions of surplus dollars from the payment system even as they sued tens of thousands of patients over unpaid bills.
Many of these suits have been filed against patients in the poorest areas of the state.
The investigation found:
* Hospital debt collection lawsuits spiked sharply between 2003 and 2006 before falling slightly last year. In all, hospitals filed more than 132,000 of these suits in the past five years, winning at least $100 million in judgments.
