Every Wednesday at noon, debt collection lawyers take their seats behind a thick wooden table in a downtown Baltimore courtroom for a ritual they call the "rocket docket."It's one way officials at the city District Court try to unclog a backlog of consumer debt lawsuits, including thousands filed by hospitals over unpaid bills.Lawyers call up debtors one at a time to work out payment plans in rapid, on-the-spot settlements. Other days, lawyers haggle with debtors in the courthouse hallways. When cases go to judges, hospitals typically win after hearings that last a few minutes or less.Nearly one-third of the 132,000 lawsuits that Maryland hospitals have filed against patients in the past five years over unpaid bills have been filed in the city District Court, which serves an area where many debtors are "living on the margins," as University of Maryland law professor and former Legal Aid lawyer Michael Millemann puts it.
These lawsuits have played out even though hospitals' costs of unpaid bills and provision of free care to the poor are supposed to be covered by the rates paid by all patients, under Maryland's unique rate-setting system. Some of the hospitals that have filed the most lawsuits have received millions of surplus dollars from the payment system.Maryland hospitals have won at least $100million in judgments against patients in the past five years and placed liens on at least 8,000 homes across the state, despite national hospital industry guidelines that caution against the wholesale use of that practice, an investigation by The Baltimore Sun found.Some hospitals have won judgments against patients covered by Medicaid for bills the giant government health plans didn't pay, despite a Maryland law outlawing that, The Sun found in sampling more than 200 court files. Hundreds of patients have filed complaints with state regulators over billing issues, including allegations that hospitals tried to collect amounts beyond what they agreed to accept under insurance company contracts by going directly after patients.And some hospitals have sued patients three or more years after their stays ended, raising questions about whether the statute of limitations had expired.
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