The first time Carlsbad Medical Center sued Misti Price, she was newly divorced and working two jobs to support her three young children.
The hospital demanded payment in 2012 for what Ms. Price recalled as an emergency room visit for one of her children who has asthma. She could not afford a lawyer, and she did not have the money to pay the bill.
Ms. Price let the summons go unanswered, figuring she would settle the balance — with interest, about $3,600 — when she could. A few months later, she opened her paycheck and discovered the hospital had garnished her wages by $870 a month.
Her car was soon repossessed because she could no longer make the payments. She was on the verge of losing her house, too, when her mortgage company stepped in to help her save it.
“I was going to let it go,” Ms. Price said, tearing up recently in an interview at the Carlsbad Public Library. “It was tough.”
And it was only the beginning. Ms. Price, 40, a nurse and local 4-H leader, has been sued five times by Carlsbad Medical Center, for bills totaling more than $17,000.
It’s not because she and her children are uninsured; according to the hospital, the charges are what she owed after her insurer had paid. But Ms. Price said she had never received an itemized bill outlining exactly what she owed money for. The collection agency wanted the balance in full, and she was not able to work out a payment plan until after she was sued.
In this town, she has a lot of company.
An examination of court records by The New York Times found almost 3,000 lawsuits filed by Carlsbad Medical Center against patients over medical debt since 2015, more than 500 of them through August of this year alone. Few hospitals sue so many patients so often.
Ms. Price’s sister, a police dispatcher, has been sued twice. Her husband has been sued. The county judge who hears many of these cases was once sued, too.
Carlsbad Medical Center is not the only hospital to have filed reams of lawsuits over unpaid bills. In Memphis, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, a nonprofit hospital, filed 8,300 lawsuits from 2014 through 2018, including some against its own employees, according to an investigation by the journalism nonprofit groups ProPublica and MLK50.
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On this day, 10 March 1952, Fulgencio Batista led a coup in Cuba and appointed himself President. Backed by the US, business and the wealthy elite, his government killed thousands in anti-Communist purges. He was eventually overthrown by the revolution in 1959. https://ift.tt/2Hcyiyi
A Labour government would look to bring in a radical “right-to-buy” scheme to help millions of private tenants in the UK buy their rented homes for a “reasonable” price, the shadow chancellor has said.
John McDonnell said he wanted to tackle the “burgeoning buy-to-let market” and problem landlords who do not maintain their properties.
The scheme, which could bring a day of reckoning for many of Britain’s 2.6 million landlords, is a twist on Margaret Thatcher’s policy of allowing council tenants to buy their homes in the 1980s – a move critics say helped cause the current housing crisis by drastically reducing the number of local authority properties.
Setting out loose guidelines for a Labour policy first suggested by Jeremy Corbyn during his 2015 party leadership bid, Mr McDonnell said the price paid by tenants who wanted to buy their home would not necessarily be the market price.
“You’d want to establish what is a reasonable price, you can establish that and then that becomes the right to buy,” he told the Financial Times. “You [the government] set the criteria. I don’t think it’s complicated.”
Mr McDonnell said the plan would be a way of redressing problems such as landlords refusing to invest in their properties while making a “fast buck” at the cost of their tenants and the community.
“We’ve got a large number of landlords who are not maintaining these properties and are causing overcrowding and [other] problems,” he added.
The National Landlords Association accused Labour of threatening to “punish” all landlords “for the sins of the few”.
Chris Norris, the organisation’s director of policy and practice, said: “To suggest that private landlords should be selling their properties to their tenants at a below market rate arbitrarily set by politicians is ludicrous. Landlords had to pay market rates themselves. It’s only right that, if and when they decide to sell it, they can do so at market rates.
“If Labour does indeed wish to fix the housing crisis, they should focus on encouraging the government to build more social housing, which is what the housing sector is lacking.”
The shadow chancellor has also previously announced plans for “inclusive ownership funds” under which every company with more than 250 employees would be required to transfer 10 per cent of their shares to their staff.
According to analysis by the Financial Times and law firm Clifford Chance, the scheme would mean £300bn worth of shares in 7,000 large companies would be handed to workers in one of the largest ever transfers of wealth from the private sector by a government in a western democracy.
On this day, 3 March 1991, Rodney King was brutally beaten by police in Los Angeles. Despite it being caught on film (almost unheard of in those days), the officers were acquitted, and the city went up in flames. https://ift.tt/2EHFU9b
