Health care billing abuses "stranger than fiction"

By Alex Parker
Chi-Town Daily News
May 22, 2009

Truth, sometimes, is stranger than fiction, said Attorney General Lisa Madigan last night, as she introduced the documentary "Do No Harm," which examines unfair hospital billing practices at a non-profit hospital in Georgia.

"I think you'll find the events recorded in this film almost sound like a plot from a bestseller by John Grisham," she said.

The film, directed by first-time Chicago filmmaker Rebecca Schanberg, debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It follows physician John Bagnato and accountant Charles Rehberg, who went head-to-head with an Albany, Ga., hospital named Phoebe Putney.

Bagnato and Rehberg endured threats and prosecution while showing the hospital overcharged poor patients with tactics such as aggressive collection practices. Some of those patients ended up filing bankruptcy.

"In the absence of laws to protect health care consumers from overly aggressive billing and collection practices, many Illinois hospitals employed strategies similar to those at Phoebe Putney," said Madigan, a leader in the state's efforts to curb expensive billing practices.

Several Chicago hospital systems, including Resurrection Health Care and Advocate Health Care, were forced to settle overcharging disputes earlier this year.

Schanberg, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Syndey Schanberg, said she hoped the film would enrage people, and move them to call for more transparency from their local non-profit hospitals.

"I think our biggest hope is that people get really angry about what's going on at their local, non-profit hospitals," she said.

A panel discussion about the state of American health care followed the film, featuring Schanberg, local physician Ann Sheets, Mark Rukavina, executive director of The Access Project, a health care advocacy group, and health care advocate Donna Smith, who was featured in the Michael Moore film "Sicko."

"From a patient's standpoint, I don't think you can overstate what happens to us in this country," said Smith, whose battles with hospitals bankrupted her. She is now a Washington lobbyist with the California Nurses Association.

Rukavina said there is hope for health care reform, a key point of President Barack Obama's campaign. He pointed to language coming from the Senate Finance Committee that proposes non-profit hospitals lose their tax-exempt status if they do not provide a certain amount of charity care.

But other panelists, and members of the audience, worried that hospitals in Chicago are not providing the care they are supposed to. One audience member noted the closure of the University of Chicago's Women's Care Clinic, announced earlier this week. Other clinics in the area have faced closure.

"It is not acceptable for a hospital to refuse to treat the people in the neighborhood," said Sheets.