With Our Wonderful Healthcare System, Violent Trauma Doesn’t End With Death
This privatized healthcare system that Rushpubliscums and their healthscare inbred masses love so much is quick to kill those who put a dent in profits, as we all know. But there are other aspects of our wonderful system that a lot of us don’t think about.
I have personally had to get really nasty with bill collectors after my mom’s passing, because of medical bills she didn’t get around to paying on her meager income. If I was the loved one of a murder victim, I cannot imagine what my reaction would be when the vultures started circling me.
Sadly, here’s the story of a couple who haven’t been traumatized enough by the loss of their son. The hospital their son went to decided to pour a busket of salt in their wounds. Just what they needed after the horror of having to bury their kid.
On Saturday, 10 days after Scott Hawkins was beaten to death inside his dormitory at California State University, Sacramento, his parents got a letter in the mail.
It contained a bill from the University of California Davis Medical Center for $29,186.50 along with a form letter addressed “Dear Patient” that implied they were indigent and stated that the hospital no longer could provide them services.
“UC Davis can no longer provide follow-up care or any other non-emergency care to you,” it read. “Please go to a County clinic for all non-emergency care or to get a referral to another doctor.”
For Gerald and Elizabeth Hawkins, it was just too much to bear.
“It was just devastating and insulting,” Gerald Hawkins said. “It’s just hard to grasp for words. My wife and I were near collapse.”
The couple said the mailing tore at the wounds opened by the loss of their 23-year-old son.
“We were just very upset on Saturday, it just all spiraled downward,” Elizabeth Hawkins said. “We called a crisis counselor and he came over and spent several hours over here.”
As a means of coping, the family made a copy of the letter, took it into the backyard of their Santa Clara, Calif., home and burned it.
Monday morning, they picked up the phone to straighten things out.
Gerald Hawkins said he first called the UC Davis billing department, but was so distraught he lost his voice and handed the phone to his wife.
“It was just one more unpleasant process,” she said. “I was crying through the whole thing.”
The parents also sent a note to the billing department noting that their son was not indigent and that he carried full medical coverage through a Kaiser Permanente plan.
Contacted by The Sacramento Bee on Monday, Carole Gan, a hospital spokeswoman, called the mailing “a mistake.”
She said she was limited in what information she could provide about the medical care provided to Scott Hawkins, but said he arrived at the emergency room at 3:11 p.m. Pacific time and was pronounced dead five minutes later.
“The trauma team did everything they could,” Gan said.
She said the bill accurately reflects the services provided but that the hospital regrets that the bill and letter were mailed to the family. She said the matter would be resolved through Hawkins’ insurance company.
As always, I would welcome any healthscare cretin that would like to tell me why this is better than the way they do things in Canada, or most of Europe. Please, defend this.
Tags: california davis medical center, failure, healthcare, private insurance, scott hawkins
November 5th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
This happened to me shortly after my mom passed away, maybe a month or so. I told them to sue me knowing they would not get penny one from me. The hardest time I did have, was with credit card companies but that is another post for another time.
November 5th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Yeah. I suggested to one particularly nasty collector that a Ouija Board was their only hope of settling the issue.
November 5th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Hee hee I went further than that. I told them she wasn’t living here anymore, so they asked me where she was. I told them Lake Tahoe by our cabin. These morans asked for the address, I told them the actual lake, that is where I spread her ashes so go try and dredge her up. Make yourselves a sand castle see if it will pay you. Otherwise sue the estate and leave me alone. I don’t know what happened, I had people that were working all that stuff out for me at the time. It wasn’t as if they had not been provided the death certificate. They had to sign it after I had done all the organ donation pprwork and the turn off the machines pprwrk. There was a social worker there for me just in case so they had to have known. CC companies got the same line, I was too upset to think of anything smarter at the time.
November 5th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Jess, I’d call that pretty smart.
Here’s the deal – unless you’re a co-signer on the card, once the cardholder dies, that’s it. If there is money in the estate to pay the bill, the card company might get paid. If there is not, tough shit for hte card company, the debt has to be wiped clean.
This story is horrendous. A co-worker’s husband died of cancer last year (43 years old). A few weeks later, she got a bill for an appointment he missed with one of his doctors…because he was FUCKING DEAD. She fought over that for a couple of weeks, with every idiot in that doctor’s office being told several times that the reason the husband did not show up for his appointment was because he was DEAD. Cheezuz, WTF do we have to do to get some electronic med records in place in this country? That was a rhetorical question.
November 5th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Know what Bee, I’ll call my uncle tomorrow and ask him what happened with that. I am all curious now to see what happened. I had my own cards and wasn’t on any of the ‘rents they had. I don’t know whether or not it got paid and don’t really care because she hardly ever carried a balance over to the next month. It may have been something she charged right before she passed away, not sure though.
Wow die and you get billed because you die. Isn’t this a great place for the “can you believe this stuff” Shouldn’t the doc have known maybe because he was treating him. What a country.