Hospitals and Equifax: Fear of Credit Score

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/03/18/the-newest-vital-sign-your-credit-score/ is just one article weighing the pros and cons of assessing patients' ability to pay by looking up their credit scores.

Actually, I think this is good...what am I nuts? I can no more pay for a medical event than any other person with both a health and a credit history...so what's the deal? It's the shakedown, the next step. Like medical care itself, we've got to go through the long painful diagnosis process before we can start healing. Equifax is not a new part of the problem, it is another part of the problem. Why do you think hospitals sit you down at one of those little desks and ask you to fill out forms for insurance, etc.? They want to get paid. Well good enough.

So what are the good things about this new "testing" of consumer acceptability to his/her health services providers? Well, we've already been rated as to our insurability and if we have a health history we don't look good on paper, we've already submitted to "testability", the number of tests we will submit to that usually means anything available in the technological world of medicine, we've already submitted to lack of privacy, since insurers can in fact demand test results before living up to their contractual requirements of coverage even after you go through hoops and get prior authorization, so what's the big deal? People who are unable to pay for medical services in the event they actually have a medical condition are not a small group of one shame-faced person, it's the growing number of all of us.

So who cares about our credit worthiness? And if we are denied care based on our inability to pay or our lousy credit score, be assured we are not alone. Now think of what else you are, what other minority are you part of? Racial, gender, age? Eventually the number of lawsuits filed against the hospitals for discrimination will outweigh their "savings" from weeding out us undesirables. And all those special folks who make the credit cut will not want to be paying for our damages for such discrimination. Their prices will keep going up.

Eventually, the hospitals will have to do something else besides continue to overcharge their acceptable patient base. And then, we enter the discounter phase...cost cutting. Reduced staff, cheaper supplies, filthier conditions, less testing...ah, it's limitless. And then, those special patients will realize they were not so special after all as their beloved who has received the "best" heart surgery is tied down with restraints in ICU because the night staff cannot monitor the medicated patient's flailing during recovery, as they are parked on a gurney outside radiology in some perverse waiting line because the staff cannot handle the number of radiology patients scheduled, as they are given sleeping medication because they've rung that stupid nursing bell one too many times, as they are exposed to an orderly who resents every minute of his underpaid job and therefore leaves patients sitting in their own waste as long as possible, as they are excluded from shared rooms because of the MRSA virus or VRE virus they got from their beloved hospital. And still, some of these "special" patients will survive and they will sue because the treatment in this hospital is not what they expected.

Background checks are good. It's time for our health services providers to trade in those stupid white coats for a smock, like every other discounter. It's time for us to realize that the buy cheap sell dear mentality has been an integral part of the medical services for many years. And when you watch them shrieking for more money, when you find them arguing with the free meal ticket that is Medicare because all those patients who got MRSA or VRE in their facility are not being covered for the infection by Medicare, when the filthy masses die off and the special folks do anything else besides cross the threshhold of these facilities, then we can decide that their reputations and history do not pass muster and that the risk in using their facility is just not worth it. Let's go...