They are lying out their ass.. if they are County hospital, it has to receive public funding because you legally can't turn a patient away and they are gonna seek the most money they can..
they have ample money.
I had a friend who had insurance and $35,000 worth of charges that the insurance co wouldn't cover (out of a $400,000+ bill) after his double bypass. They asked him if he could pay it, he told them no, so they reduced the bill to just what the insurance company paid. And my mother in law spent six months there before she passed away last summer. $1.5 million dollar bill, the hospital accepted whatever medicare paid.
Six months ago when my orthopedic doctor setup my arm surgery at this same hospital, I went to pre-surgery dept two days before the surgery, checked in with the check in lady who sent me to the money lady who told me that it was $36,000 and that I had to pay 50% up front. I told her "hell know it isn't because I'm not paying anything like that...I will chew off my arm before I do that." She then told me that since I didn't have insurance they would reduce the cost to $24,000, and once again I told her that they weren't going to do that because I wasn't going to get the surgery done there.
I walked out, drove a half mile down the same street, walked into the Ambulatory Surgery Center, asked them how much, they told me $5k, so I told them to call my doct and schedule me asap. I drove back to my orthopedic doctors office, asked him if to change my surgery location. The ironic thing is that my orthopedic doctors office is owned by the same hospital system, and so is the Ambulatory Surgery Center.
My doc later told me that he prefered to do it at the Ambulatory Surgery Center, but that he only scheduled it for the hospital because he knew that they would take payments. I said "doc, half of $24k is $12k, so by going to the Ambulatory Surgery Center, I've immediately saved $7k in out of pocket expenses, plus I don't have to make payments." He just said "I see your point". I don't think he realized that they were going to demand 50% up front.
No one actually needs to cover bills that go unpaid, they just use accounting entries to deal with the issue. Hospital bills are jacked up to begin with, and are often almost random.
My wife was once charged hundreds of dollars for "bedpan rental" on a single night stay - she never used a bedpan and to the best of our knowledge, there was not one in the room. I objected to the charge, they said "ok, we will just take that off". I took my son for an xray when he fell out of a tree, after waiting four hours, they came in and told me that the xray was defective and that he would have to take another one. We walked out. Ended up getting a $800 bill, I sent the bill back with a letter explaining that they rendered no service of value to us. Never heard anything about that bill again, not from a bill collector, not on my credit report, I suppose they just disappeared it.
Sometimes I have customers to stiff me, I just eat the loss, unless it's an excessive amount of money, at which time I usually threaten to kill them and I get paid pretty rapidly after that (I'm kidding of course...or am I?). The hospital is no different, except that they have such huge profits that they can afford to eat the lost much easier that I can.
By the way, hospitals absolutely can turn people away. All they have to do is to insure that the condition is stablized. There was no requirement that any hospital reattach my tricep muscle to the bone - it wasn't life or death, it was just whether or not I would ever have use of that arm again. In my case, I never even went to the emergency room - torn muscles and broken bones (except for compound fractures) aren't considered emergencies. Heart attacks and open wounds are. If hospitals had to treat everyone for everything, then why would anyone ever need insurance?
