Mills called The Virginian-Pilot after reading a story earlier this month on how nonprofit hospitals with charity care programs sometimes take low-income patients to court for nonpayment. He thought immediately of his friend and wondered if there was a way to help him.
Chesapeake Regional Medical Center officials said Roberts failed to provide adequate documentation of his income in 2001, when he incurred much of the debt.
"In all cases, it is our policy to work diligently to help our patients qualify for financial assistance when they are eligible or negotiate a reasonable payment schedule with them," hospital spokeswoman Joan Stanus said in a written statement. "However, we need the necessary financial documentation in order to provide this assistance."
Though Roberts gave permission to hospital officials to talk about his care and finances, Chesapeake hos! pital officials declined to comment beyond that written statement.
Earlier this summer, Henry Brown, a consultant who was serving as the Chesapeake health system's interim chief financial officer, spoke about charity care and collections. He said the Chesapeake system provided free care to patients who made less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. In 2007, the federal poverty level for a single person is $10,210.
Beyond that income level, charity care is decided on a case-by-case basis and part of the determination was on the catastrophic nature of the debt, Brown said. Conceivably, he said, even someone with a good income could qualify if the debt was overwhelming. If at any point in the process the system finds out it has gone after someone who really does qualify, he said, "we take it back from the collections agency."
"We have a great hospital here," Brown said. "We live that concept of caring."
Roberts, 49, wouldn't argue - at le! ast on the caregiver side. He credits the people at Chesapeake! General with saving his life, particularly a priest who came to him late in the night on March 14, 2002.
It had been a long haul for Roberts. He first noticed the small blister in February 2001 and had it treated, but the infection developed. Roberts said his daily treatments at Chesapeake General started around April 2001.
Roberts, who used to be a florist, said he was unemployed and uninsured at the time. He said Medicaid started covering his care on Dec. 1, 2001. But while his health insurance woes had ended, his health took a downward spiral when he contracted an antibiotic-resistant infection on his foot.
"It was consuming an inch of flesh a day," Roberts said. If it continued, he was told, it would kill him. He said he refused to give permission to do the amputation, preferring to just die.
"The only thing that changed my mind was an old minister, a Catholic priest," Roberts said.
The priest reminded Roberts of his gifts as a musician. He pl! ayed the piano for 40 years, sometimes professionally, and still plays for his church. By rejecting treatment and hastening his own death, the priest told Roberts, "you're throwing away the talent God gave you."
Roberts told the priest to ask a nurse to bring him the permission papers, and on the morning of March 15, 2002, his 44th birthday, his right leg was amputated just below the knee.
That surgery was covered by Medicaid, but the foot treatments in 2001 were not. The bills felt like "a bag of cinder blocks on your shoulders," he said.
Roberts said he met regularly with Chesapeake hospital officials "who tried their best to come up with a monthly payment plan," but he said they agreed after looking at his bank statements that he didn't have enough money.
Roberts' records of what his actual income was in 2001 are spotty. He said that he no longer made any money after his floral shop went out of business and that he stopped filing income tax ! returns around 1998.
But Roberts provided The Pilot wi! th recor ds documenting that when Chesapeake General Hospital took him to court his income was just more than $6,000 from Social Security disability benefits. He cannot work, he said, because that would make him ineligible for health care benefits.
Roberts said that at the January 2006 hearing in Chesapeake Circuit Court he asked the judge, "Are these people going to take away my house?"
"You could have heard a pin drop," Roberts said.
According to Roberts, the lawyer for the Chesapeake Hospital Authority said it didn't do that kind of thing.
Hospital officials declined to say this week whether they were considering erasing the debt and removing the threat to Roberts' house. They also would not say how they determined the 18 percent interest rate charged on the unpaid bill.
In 2005, state Del. Bob Purkey, R-Virginia Beach, sponsored a bill that would have capped interest rates on unpaid medical bills for indigent patients at an annual rate of 4 per! cent.
"The hospitals fought it tooth and nail and would not let it pass," Purkey said Wednesday.
Roberts' health is failing. The house where he lives with his 15-year-old dog, Dusty, is cluttered; he hasn't been able to keep it clean. He apologizes that it doesn't look "nice" like it should.
Contemplating a life free of the hospital debt, Roberts said, "That would give me the freedom to be able to go into an assisted living situation, a perpetual care situation.... This is just a major source of worry and depression for me."
Source: http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=133420&ran=103979&lid=homePO
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