Debt Collectors At Hospitals Face Federal Inquiry Over Allegations Of Hassling Patients

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is "looking into" allegations that debt collectors have pressured hospital patients for money. Government regulators are looking into reports of aggressive debt collectors hassling patients at hospitals.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Wednesday that her department is "looking into" allegations that "aggressive contractors were confronting patients in the hospital setting, not making it clear that they were actually bill collectors and not part of the hospital system."

Sebelius was speaking at a press conference with Attorney General Eric Holder announcing the arrest of more than 100 people in major health care fraud busts.

Democrats in Congress are also demanding answers about hospital debt collection. Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.), the most senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as Democratic Reps. Diana DeGette (Colo.) and G.K. Butterfield (N.C.), sent a letter Wednesday to Mary Tolan, CEO of Accretive Health, asking her to attend a briefing with them on Friday. Accretive Health, the debt-collection company that reportedly embedded employees inside hospitals and allegedly hassled patients at their bedsides and in emergency rooms, was not mentioned by Sebelius in her speech.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) and Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) previously called for investigations into Accretive Health. Franken also wants a response from Tolan by Friday, The Hill reported. Representatives from Accretive Health will attend Friday's briefing with Waxman, company spokeswoman Rhonda Barnat said.

Debt collectors are employing an array of increasingly harsh tactics to get money for their clients and are even reportedly resorting to lies and threats. Hospitals, which must treat everyone who shows up at an emergency room regardless of their ability to pay, are under intense pressure to collect as much money as possible. They also face lower fees for the services they provide, especially from Medicare and Medicaid, and are suffering in the sluggish economy. The American Hospital Association says hospitals bore $39.3 billion in unpaid bills in 2010.

The methods allegedly used by Accretive Health at two Minnesota hospitals, Fairview Health Services and North Memorial Health Care, have raised the ire of state and federal officials. Accretive Health employees working inside the facilities pressured emergency room patients to pay upfront or to make payments on old bills, and even visited some patients in their rooms, according to Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson, who issued a lengthy report last month detailing the ways company employees try to extract money from patients who owe hospitals. Swanson also sued the company in January, alleging it violated privacy laws when an employee left a laptop computer with sensitive information about 23,500 patients in a rental car, from which it was stolen.

Accretive Health denies the charges and asked a federal judge to dismiss Swanson's lawsuit on Monday. Swanson's actions have harmed the company, which is considering "legal remedies for the damages that have already resulted and will continue to flow," Accretive Health's lawyer, Andrew Clubok of Kirkland & Ellis, wrote in a letter to Minnesota Solicitor General Alan Gilbert on Wednesday.

"Your Office has disclosed confidential documents, conducted negotiations in bad faith, and failed to investigate properly the allegations that Attorney General Swanson has now take to press," Clubok wrote.

The company has been hit hard by the negative publicity. Accretive Health stock lost more than half its value in the past two weeks. Shares were valued at $19 on April 23, the day before Swanson issued her report and The New York Times published a story about the company, but have plummeted. Accretive Health closed at $8.61 Wednesday and and at one point dipped to $8.41, the lowest price since the firm went public in May 2010.

Accretive Health made the unusual move of prohibiting the news media from a shareholder meeting Wednesday and declined to discuss the allegations about its practices with attendees, the Chicago Tribune reported.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/02/debt ... 78&ref=business

Note to self:  go short on Accretive Health stock.

Good follow-on to this thread:

Debt Collector Is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals
https://800notes.com/forum/ta-559bcc3f9837f8b ... cs-in-hospitals

Here's the story from Accretive's home town about its intrusive bedside "financial consultations", a practice the rogue debt collection agency likes to call the "Accretive Secret Sauce":

Accretive Health's collection tactics fuel hospital outsourcing debate
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04-27 ... m-recovery-beds

We can expect Accretive execs to cry like babies because Minnesota AG Swanson's report "does not reference any specific situations in which alleged delays in care resulted in a bad medical outcome". I suppose the evidence is largely anecdotal, which is understandable, given that the attention of patients and their families is rather divided when diabetic Gramps is having three toes severed or Auntie is getting a cancerous tumor carved out.

Accretive's whiny response ignores the entire point of a law like HIPAA, and also the strict liability aspect of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The *potential* for harm can weigh just as heavily as actual harm in a FDCPA case, which anyone deceived by an Accretive doppelganger certainly has.

Along that theme of potential harm, the Minneapolis Star Tribune points back to where this issue was uncorked:

Accretive seeks dismissal of suit over lost laptop, health records
http://www.startribune.com/local/149593285.html

There is absolutely no excuse in the year 2012 for our corporations to have learned nothing from years of prior examples of lax data security policy. It's the same tired story every time this happens ....

A. Foggy corpo employee mislays a portable computer on a car seat or a hotel bar stool.
B. Device goes missing mainly because the hardware is "money with a handle on it".
C. Device stores buckets of sensitive data which either the employee did not require for any task or was not authorized to haul around in the first place.
D. Device has no data safeguarding, such as encryption and passcodes. (... or if there is a passcode it's a weak "luggage code" like "1111".)

Accretive hit all four above points right on schedule and has a legal spanking due. "No harm done" is not an excuse when you catch a child playing with fire. You take away the matchbox and scold the child, precisely because you want to prevent the worst and most likely outcome of doing nothing in response.

They are interfering with patient care---and if Accretive's slimy debt collection tactics is not a violation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), I don't know what is. Sebelious needs to do more than just "look into it" and permanently and legally enjoin these cretins from ever stepping foot into another emergency or patient room again.

I am FURIOUS.

This makes for an interesting situation:  a debt collector for a medical bill contacts all of the patient's family and friends that he can find and tells them about the debt before contacting the patient, not in situ but after the patient has been discharged.  Actually, maybe while the patient is still in the hospital.  (Sound Familiar????)  Not only has the debt collector violated the FDCPA, the debt collector has also violated HIPAA regulations.  

For the most part, if a hospital is non-profit, they use all of their charity care (patients who can't pay) to establish non-profit status with the IRS and other benefits.  The hospitals that are for profit are another story.  

It's interesting that Minnesota fought allowing for profit health care into the state well into the 1980s.

Your fury is justified. These Ac-cretins and the weak-willed hospital execs who hired them went very wrong in three directions. I only hope the higher authorities see the same scale of damage. I usually harp on people to fight their own tormentors, but those in or near a medical crisis need serious outside help with such a cluster of illegal behaviors.

This is dated, but it bears mentioning here, seeing as how Toby is talking about Accretive stock.  The federal inquiry is just one of many:  No. 2 is MN's AG going after Accretive for HIPAA vioations - I don't have the link handy but I believe that I read about this on the Huffington Post.  No. 3 is a law suit against Accretive brought on by their stockholders:

http://www.accretivehealthstocklawsuit.com/index.html



because Accretive is 'engaging in practices that leave it vulnerable to prosecution' and such risky behavior is lowering the price of their stock.

Original Business Start Date: January 2005
Principal: Mr. Steve Walters, Vice President
Customer Contact: Mr. Steve Walters, Vice President - (866) 249-2094
Type Of Business: Collection Agencies
BBB Accreditation: This organization is a BBB Accredited Business.
Additional DBA Names: Accretive Health
Incorporated: January 2005, DE
Entity: Partnership
Employees: 170

Pasted from <http://www.debt-consolidation.com/collection- ... cial-solutions/>

MN attorney general complaint April 2012

Accretive listed “Medical Financial Solutions” as an assumed name according to the MN attorney general complaint April 2012, page 1.

http://www.ag.state.mn.us/PDF/PressReleases/ComplianceReview/Vol.%205.pdf

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MINNESOTA LAWSUIT

http://www.ag.state.mn.us/PDF/Consumer/AccretiveHealth20120119.pdf

Accretive seeks dismissal of suit over lost laptop, health records

Pasted from <http://www.startribune.com/local/149593285.html>

Accretive Health Debt Collector Defends Embedding Employees Inside Hospitals

Pasted from <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/accr ... _n_1509329.html>

Debt Collector Is Faulted for Tough Tactics in Hospitals

Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/business/de ... -hospitals.html>


Accretive Health's collection tactics fuel hospital outsourcing debate

Pasted from <http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04-27 ... m-recovery-beds>

ATTORNEY GENERAL SWANSON SUES ACCRETIVE HEALTH FOR PATIENT PRIVACY VIOLATIONS, as of 1/19/2012

Pasted from <https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/PressRelease/120119AccretiveHealth.asp>

Accretive is licensed as a debt collection agency in Minnesota.  Last year it raised over $100 million in a public securities offering.  As noted above, Accretive Health is a portfolio company of Accretive, LLC, a Wall Street private equity fund with a controversial history in Minnesota relating to the arbitration and collection of consumer debts.  In 2009 the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office sued the National Arbitration Forum—the nation’s largest consumer credit arbitration company—for telling consumers and courts that it independently and neutrally decided consumer credit cases when, in fact, it was affiliated with a New York private equity fund that owned the major debt collection enterprise that filed cases with the Forum.  That equity fund was Accretive, LLC, and it set up the enterprise in which it simultaneously took control of the nation’s largest debt collection enterprise and became affiliated with the Forum.  In the wake of the lawsuit, the National Arbitration Forum was banned from arbitrating consumer credit disputes, and the debt collector owned by Accretive, LLC shut down.  Accretive, LLC (the master equity fund), however, survived, and Accretive Health is one of its portfolio companies.

Pasted from <https://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/PressRelease/120119AccretiveHealth.asp>

More Lawsuits

Norberg v. Medical Financial Solutions

Pasted from <http://dockets.justia.com/docket/michigan/miwdce/1:2011cv00346/66117/>


Blose v. Medical Financial Solutions et al

Pasted from <http://dockets.justia.com/docket/vermont/vtdce/2:2010cv00271/19699/>

Colbert v. Medical Financial Solutions

Pasted from <http://dockets.justia.com/docket/michigan/miwdce/1:2010cv00762/63680/>

Crump v. Medical Financial Solutions

Pasted from <http://dockets.justia.com/docket/michigan/miwdce/1:2010cv00656/63360/>