In the courthouse hallway, during the recess, a woman I had never met stopped me and said she used to work in that hospitals billing office, that the six days of charges were no mistake, and that she knew whose name was really on them.
The six days of intensive care billed to my husband after he was already dead were not an error, they were real care given to a different patient, moved onto a dead mans account by a biller who figured a corpse would never complain.
The judge had already stopped the lawsuit cold. On page 61 of the ninety-four-page itemized bill, the one I circled at Lous workbench with a ruler and a red pen over four nights, was ICU care billed through January 25th. Lou died on January 19th. Counsel, what date is on this mans death certificate, the judge asked, and then, why is the hospital charging ICU care through January 25th, six more days, medications, a ventilator, doctor visits, for a man who was already at the funeral home. Sixty-one thousand nine hundred and forty dollars, billed after Lou died.
Then she looked at the collector, Troy, who had been calling me every morning. I had brought a notebook with every call, date, time, and what he said. Dead men dont pay bills, widows do. Youll be eating cat food by summer. Federal law says a debt collector cannot harass you or use abusive language, and Troy stopped smiling.
I am Nadine. I am sixty-seven. I drove a school bus in Dayton for thirty-one years and never missed a route in a snowstorm. My husband Lou was a tool-and-die man, forty years at the same shop, and last winter he had a heart attack in our driveway shoveling snow, and after eleven days in the ICU he was gone. Six weeks later the bill came, two hundred twelve thousand dollars, and three months after that it went to collections, and the calls started.
My sister said just set up a payment plan and stop fighting it. I did not argue with her. But I called the hospital and asked for an itemized bill, every charge, every day, every line, and it came in a box, ninety-four pages, and I read all of it.
The woman in the hallway explained what the billing office had done. Another patient had run past what their insurance would cover, a very expensive patient, and rather than eat the loss, a billing supervisor moved six days of that patients ICU care onto Lous account, because Lou was dead and dead men, as Troy so kindly put it, do not check their statements. She knew the supervisors name because she had refused to do it herself and been pushed out for it.
Billing a deceased patient for care he never received, to cover another patients bill, is fraud, plain and serious, and it is exactly the kind of thing that turns a collection lawsuit into an investigation of the people who filed it. The whistleblower gave her statement to the court and to the state.
The judge did not just throw out the six days. She ordered the entire bill reviewed line by line, because a bill with sixty-two thousand dollars of fraud in it cannot be trusted anywhere else either. When the real review was done, what I actually owed, after Lous insurance and the corrections, was a small fraction of that terrifying number, and far less than the house they told me to sell.
Troys agency faced the law too, not my tears. Harassing a grieving widow, using abusive language, chasing a padded and partly fraudulent bill, is a violation of federal debt-collection law, and a notebook with every call written down is the kind of record that wins.
Dead men dont pay bills, widows do, Troy told me, and laughed. This widow read all ninety-four pages at her husbands workbench and circled the line that brought the whole thing down. I did not sell my house. I did not eat cat food. And the hospital learned that a bus driver who never missed a snowstorm route does not miss a billing error either.