Advocate for Aurora to provide debt relief to patients with liens on their homes

Some Wisconsin residents who have unpaid medical bills from Advocate Aurora Health could receive relief as health care providers face greater scrutiny over the issue.

Advocate Health, a nonprofit health system and parent company of Advocate Aurora Health, plans to lift more than 11,500 liens on homes or other properties when people have not paid their medical bills and forgive those debts, according to a news release.

The move is being implemented at Advocate Health, which operates in six states, and is part of a broader change to the system’s debt collection policies.

It’s unclear how many Wisconsin patients may be affected. A spokesman declined to provide details.

Advocate Health is based in North Carolina and has hospitals and clinics in Wisconsin, Illinois and four southern states. Milwaukee hospitals include Aurora Sinai Medical Center and Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center.

Before the pandemic and before it became part of Advocate Health, Advocate Aurora filed thousands of lawsuits each year – the most of any health system in Wisconsin – to collect unpaid medical bills. But in February 2020, the system stopped filing lawsuits and dropped all active cases.

More recently, Advocate Health has made additional changes to its medical debt policy. According to Advocate’s press release, these include:

No more reporting delinquent medical debts to credit bureaus.
Raise the threshold for eligibility for financial assistance or charitable care to three times the federal poverty level. A family of four with an income of $93,600 or less would be eligible.

“When we expanded our charity insurance policy, we immediately began evaluating all previously outstanding liens and concluded that most of these patients would be covered by our new policy,” said Brad Clark, chief financial officer of Advocate Health.

“As the next step in our plan to make health care more affordable, we are accelerating this process and removing liens on homes and properties to cover unpaid medical bills,” Clark said in a statement.

Bobby Peterson, patient advocate and executive director of ABC for Health, a public interest law firm in Madison, praised the changes as steps in the right direction.

“I think the tide is turning,” he said. “Many providers receive a fairly large, healthy tax exemption from the communities in which they operate, and there is a lot of oversight.”

The lawyer has come under scrutiny in North Carolina

Advocate’s announcement comes amid efforts by North Carolina, where Advocate is based, to combat medical debt.

The Charlotte Observer reported that North Carolina’s governor and top health officials leveraged billions of new federal dollars from the state’s recent Medicaid expansion to force hospitals to forgive patient debt or risk missing out on the additional funding.

The plan, unveiled over the summer, was opposed by the state’s hospital industry, including Advocate leaders in North Carolina, but moved forward with the blessing of federal officials, the Observer reported.

Nonprofit health systems like Advocate Health have faced criticism for suing patients to collect unpaid medical bills and using other aggressive tactics despite enjoying billions of dollars in tax exemptions.

Before stopping those practices, health systems say they were using lawsuits as a last resort after months of trying to collect on those debts.

A provision in the Affordable Care Act requires nonprofit hospitals to provide patients with their financial assistance policies — in plain language — before suing patients for medical debt or placing a lien on their property.

Nonprofit hospitals each establish policies that determine who is eligible for financial assistance or charity care and how to apply for it. Some Wisconsin hospitals offer free care or discounts for patients living up to four times the poverty level, or $60,240 for an individual. Some others offer free care to those earning less than two and a half times the threshold, or $37,650 for an individual.

Peterson, of ABC for Health, said some patients may not know that hospitals offer financial assistance and that the application process can be difficult to navigate.

In its press release, Advocate Health said it is contacting people whose liens will be removed, starting with the oldest cases. Some of the liens date back 20 years or more.

The process of removing liens takes time, the release said. For more information, visit www.advocatehealth.org/liens.

Contact Sarah Volpenhein at [email protected] or 414-607-2159. Follow her on X at @SarahVolp.

Advocate for Aurora to provide debt relief to patients with liens on their homes

ByJasper

The lawyer has come under scrutiny in North Carolina

By Jasper

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