A Seattle hospital charged over $1K for clipping a toenail. The Seattle Times has the story:
Suit over toenail bill from clinic can be class action
It began last year with Lori Mill's toenail - or rather, with Mill's $1,133 medical bill from Virginia Mason Medical Center for a 30-second office procedure on her toenail.
Mill complained about a $418 charge for "miscellaneous hospital charges." When Virginia Mason responded that it routinely adds such a "facilities charge" when patients go to its downtown clinic instead of its other clinics, she got a lawyer and sued.
This week, a King County Superior Court judge granted class-action status to her consumer-protection lawsuit, meaning she will represent all Virginia Mason patients whose bills have included such fees. That likely will encompass tens of thousands of patients, said Mill's attorney, John Phillips.
And lawyer Phillips:
Phillips has obtained internal Virginia Mason e-mail from the medical center's own doctors and staff complaining about the charges.
One doctor, whose name was omitted from the e-mail, had a procedure on his own toe at the downtown clinic and then e-mailed Virginia Mason's CEO, Dr. Gary Kaplan, after he got the bill last year. The total bill was $1,200, the doctor wrote. And $1,138 of that was the facilities charge.
"I call it obscene," the doctor wrote Kaplan. "There has to be some sense of appropriateness/fairness/reasonableness to our charges."
Another doctor, dermatologist Allan Kayne, complained about a $1,361 bill sent to one of his patients. More than half - $754 - was a facilities fee. "These charges are not only excessive, but an embarrassment to me and the medical center," Kayne wrote.
Ouch! Virginia Mason is a good hospital (Jen and I both went there for work on our knees) but these charges are way out of line.
