When Hospitals Sue For Unpaid Bills, It Can Be 'Ruinous' For Patients

"Hospitals were built — mostly by churches — to be a safe haven for people regardless of one's race, creed or ability to pay. Hospitals have a nonprofit status — most of them — for a reason," says Martin Makary, one of the JAMA study's authors and a surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine. "They're supposed to be community institutions."

There are no good national data on the practice, but journalists have reported on hospitals suing patients all over the United States, from North Carolina to Nebraska to Ohio. In 2014, NPR and ProPublica published stories about a hospital in Missouri that sued 6,000 patients over a four-year period.

The full NPR article can be viewed at this link.