This is my thread transplant operation on a
story first pointed to us by BigA two Saturdays ago. I've below hyperlinked the CNN original, on principle and for embedding nice photos.
Arkansas hospital sued thousands of patients over medical bills during the pandemic, including hundreds of its own employees - CNN, 08 Sep 2023
The CNN piece is not a good fit for the Florida HCA thread. That issue centered on very inflated and brain-dead billing of a child which should not have been generated. It's implausible for all of the U. of Arkansas for Medical Sciences debts to be phantoms. CNN's team was too busy charting victim impact to ask if any of those accounts were once or now valid. "Fair Debt" defenses won't care about this, but the judges greenlighting all those asset seizures do. Now on to my cold prologue ....
MMmmm, yeeaah, there's nothing like the smell of defib paddles pressed against the leathery skin of medical bills that no one gave odds would walk again.
The heartbeat of the UAMS story is its Faustian bargain with local debt collectors. Everything else is collateral damage. A hospital system wanted less red ink in its ledger, and some parasites sold them the idea of mining dusty old accounts for profit. I don't find it coincidental that a "governmental debt" exception to a Statute of Limitations has been exploited. I would hope for a successful argument that state law has been stretched way past the intended scope.
I hate simultaneously to be the rumbling rain cloud in the room, but when you ignore the collector's phone calls, toss its letters, and ignore its summons, poverty cries won't save your bank account and you can't declare the process unfair. Room for debate opens when enough people have seriously engaged the pre-litigation collection and found it wanting, frustrating, and/or predatory. CNN's reporters are silent on this.
In fairness I've gone mining for complaints against Mid-South Adjustment. Many are frivolous, about as many describe fairly common illegal tactics. A couple standouts were new to me, and it gets harder to surprise me the longer I study the industry.
First I'd found
one 800Notes thread dating to early 2009. Most remarks concern 'Disclosure Chicken' and the resulting anger misdirected at the MSA agents for obeying FDCPA privacy rules. A couple of them describe 'False Skip Trace', hitting workplaces and distant relatives shortly after direct contact with the hunted party. One woman got the 'Family Messenger Service' treatment, enlisting her elderly father minutes after she failed to respond to a call at work, which again begs a question of why her
personal phone was ignored.
Next came a smattering of complaints on BBB (present and deleted) and attorney websites which live in "collection without reasonable basis" territory, the same kind of feeding ground which gave fellow
med collector Phoenix Financial a CFPB bellyache this Summer. The CFPB database has been the most revealing resource, where I count 75 entries, of which only 44 yield useful details. Perhaps a third of that subset I dismiss as invalid, mostly whining without a defense that credit report tradelines aren't erased and claiming "HIPPA" [sic] violation for the mere act of collection. Never confuse unreasonable expectation with curable harm.
What's left over echoes the triple-B and scattered sources in describing serious complaint patterns:
* 'Family Reunion' false skip calls to long-estranged and/or very distant relations
* Hassling workplaces without first trying any personal phone number
* Silently parking dubious and paid accounts on the credit reports as a squeeze tactic
* Failure to correct credit report errors and/or cease collection of debts applied via identity theft
* Collecting without sending dunning letters with all required disclosures
* Collecting accounts already paid via insurance or Veterans Admin benefits
* Collecting accounts from the wrong person entirely
Dirtier tricks seep from the seams:
* Mar 2021: Alleged debtor claimed to receive a misleadingly backdated second dunning letter after challenging missing required disclosures in the first. It's unclear due to redactions how many days elapsed between letters.
* Nov & Dec 2021: Two complaints that people requesting signed original contracts were told that's not happening, then counter-demanded to provide a driver's license (an image copy, I hope) to verify signatures. Absent some weirdo Arkansas law I haven't read, there is no statutory requirement for "account level" paperwork when validating debts, so I don't know why the objection handling veers off to almost inviting ID theft. It does seem more like unfairly shifting the burden of proof back to the alleged debtor, if not merely generating empty busywork.
* Apr 2023: A woman in Florida found her son's Arkansas medical bills pinned to her credit reports, despite her utter lack of association as a responsible party.
* Apr 2023: Alleged debtor was first notified of debt at home by a supposed government agent, who threatened property seizure and credit score damage for nonpayment of some doctor's bill. There was also a daily phone call barrage which may have followed the doorstep ambush, but the timing is not certainly stated. Meantime the complainant insisted there was no prior billing from the practice.
The required caveat is that any of these stories could be hiding ten-foot plot holes. The counter-caveat is my finding that no story at first reading in this field is too crazy to be true. This is an industry which attracts sadistic and diseased minds, who might tell people they're going to prison without "a single drop of water", or don a fake police uniform with belted cuffs and pistols to collect in person, or advise the destitute to commit suicide via speeding subway train, or threaten to exhume a dead relative and swing the corpse from a tree branch.
Mid-South Adjustment hasn't yet flattened the Crazy Gauge needle, but they and their courthouse attack dog Brad Dowler are worrisome enough that I had a specific theory to test with my complaint trawling. I wanted to see if the hospital group's execs had reason to know they were possibly turning loose lawbreaking hyenas on their own community and pandemic-fatigued employees. Valid complaints prior to 2018 are sparse and relatively less severe, not that I feel forgiving of any, and not that I believe the Internet always has a long memory. But boy howdy, right around when UAMS inks its deal with MSA, the complaints start climbing in both volume and outrage.
The gift of the CFPB is benchmarking. Its oldest complaint on MSA was filed in October 2015. There it sat by its lonesome until 05 April 2018, and the stream has been steady. The two most recent entries came in June this year. The debts in controversy run from two to four figures. I saw only one claim over two grand, a $6K combined total from multiple visits to the same doctor which has the patient baffled. The lowest balance quoted was a whopping $33. Including tip jar, I think I paid more for two Chinese take-out entrées last week.
The presence of a whole class of debtors defaulting on mostly penny-ante bills is a broader economic failure. J.O.B. holders are "just over broke" and glorified Skid Row health care is charged at Fifth Avenue prices. We have to expect the rats and vultures to come for regular feeding. If UAMS won't call the exterminator, they might as well change all those self-congratulatory banners to read "DEBTORS WORK HERE".
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