Of the nation’s 20 most populous counties, none has a higher concentration of medical debt than Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth. Second is Dallas County, credit bureau data shows. Via KHNews:
Sign up for The BriefPROSPER, Texas — Almost everything about the opening of the 2019 Prosper High School Eagles’ football season was big.
A KHN review of hospital finances in the country’s 306 hospital markets found that several of the most profitable markets also have some of the highest levels of patient debt. David Zipprich, a Fort Worth businessman and grandfather, was forced out of retirement after hospitalizations left him owing more than $200,000.
“My stress was off the charts,” he said, sitting in his neatly kept living room with his Shih Tzu, Murphy. Johnson said the center, where she’d gone after a knee injury, initially said her visits would cost $60. “Then they billed me hundreds,” she said. “I don’t go to the doctor unless I absolutely have to because it’s so expensive.”
But Smith and other hospital leaders point to billions of dollars of free or discounted care that hospitals nationwide provide every year. on their quality and community benefits. But he asked: “Is a hospital truly serving its community if it’s pushing so many into debt?” By comparison, profits at most of the 25 Fortune 500 companies based around Dallas-Fort Worth, such as ExxonMobil, were less than 6% in 2019, according to Fortune data.Hospitals have thrived in other markets with high patient debt, KHN found.
“You might think that hospitals in communities where patients have a lot of debt would be less profitable, but that doesn’t seem to be the case,” said Anuj Gangopadhyaya, a senior Urban Institute researcher who worked with KHN onIn fact, the analysis found, there is no apparent relationship between the profits of hospitals in a market and how much medical debt residents have.
, a nonprofit that tracks costs nationwide. And in a state where most markets have relatively low medical prices, in-patient care at Dallas-Fort Worth hospitals was 13% more expensive than the national median in 2020. “The rates at which patient balances are growing is just unsustainable for our health systems,” Sanderson said, predicting that most will never be able to collect bills of this size. “It’s trending to the ridiculous.”
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