So I sat down yesterday and typed this letter out and sent it to everyone and anyone I could find on the St.Vincent website. Read it and then the resolution to this issue!!!
The Letter:
February 8, 2008
Dear Sir or Madam:
Our family has been greatly mistreated by staff at your hospital and I would like for you to be aware of these issues. I am going to give you some of the background before I go into the full story.
Our son, Evan, was born 6 weeks premature on September 24, 2003 at St. Vincent Indianapolis. He spent 28 days in the NICU and has a heart and kidney condition on top of a permanent hearing loss in both ears. We have always done all of our hospital work and specialist with this hospital and have never had any issues. Today was a complete different day.
Our family was awarded a $3000.00 grant from United Children’s Healthcare Foundation in June 2007 to be applied to new hearing aids for Evan. We started the process in December 2007 to get new ones. Michelle Wagner Escobar has been our audiologist until that time and has always treated extremely well and professional. When she moved on to other job opportunities we were referred to Leah Mosinski. I have informed her from day one that we have this grant and we also knew our family would be responsible for the remaining balance after the grant paid. So we went into St. Vincent Audiology Department on January 21st at 11:00 a.m. to be fitted for new ear molds and to pick out his new hearing aids. Again I informed them that the grant would need to be billed first but the grant foundation will not take a bill from St. Vincent directly, it needs to come from the person awarded the grant. I was again told this would not be a problem. I came home that day and contacted the billing department at 317-338-8035 to inform them that we are coming on February 8th to pick up the new hearing and that the remaining balance of $1673.00 we were responsible for. I said we will need to get a Personal Finance Loan to pay this off, which we have done several times with St. Vincent. I was informed that would not be a problem but we could not set this up until services were rendered, which would be today. After I got off the phone with them I called Leah back to inform her that I had just spoken with the billing department and we would getting a loan to pay the remaining balance. My final statement to her was, “ I do not want to bring this child in on February 8th to pick up his new ears and then be told we have to pay the entire balance to receive the hearing aids” and was told “No, this will not happen, you will be able to leave with the hearing aids that day”. For the last two weeks we have talked this up with our four year old son that he was getting his new ears soon and our whole family was excited about getting these. Our appointment was today and everything went fine with Leah and she walked us down to the billing department where I was met with Peggy. I informed her about all of my previous conversation with the billing department and Leah about this and she said “That is not St. Vincent policy and you will need to pay the entire balance to leave with the hearing aids”, she also informed me that there are no notes in my son files and asked me who I spoke with. She then spoke with her supervisor, Brenda, who was sitting next to her and said all the same things I had said and I was again informed that “St. Vincent’s policy is you must pay in full for hearing aids before you leave the hospital because hearing aids are considered an item not a service”. She then took me back to her supervisor, Kathyrn, and I again had to explain the situation. Kathyrn asked me “Do you have the hearing aids now?” and of course we did my son was sitting right next to me. She again called Leah and informed her that she didn’t know what to do in this situation. When she got off the phone with her she said, “Well the paperwork only shows you owe $1673.00 so let’s just get this set up with Personal Finance today and then you can go because they should have never given you the hearing aids without securing payment first. I said that is fine I will even pay the first loan payment today as long as we get to leave with the hearing aids. She went back out to the cashier ladies and came back and informed me that they can’t do a loan with Personal Finance for hearing aids because they are items not services. So I was going to have to pay the entire balance of $4673.00 today or not leave with the hearing aids. By this time I am so upset with the way I have been treated that I take the hearing aids back down to the audiology department and give them everything back. My son continues to cry for the next 2 hours because he did not get to leave with his new ears. Exactly what I was trying to not happen happened. I called Leah back at 1:00 pm today and said if I found a way to pay for the entire balance today could I get Evan’s hearing aids shipped to us overnight to receive them on Saturday night? She said the grant will pay for the $3000.00 all I would have to pay is the $1673.00 to get them and I told her that is the exact opposite that the billing department told me. She said she would have to check and see if she could get them mailed out today by UPS, she wasn’t sure if the shipment had went out, and that there would be a fee to that. I informed her that we should not have to pay for that because I had done everything to make sure this didn’t happen and I have had to listen to my child cry for two hours because of this whole ordeal. She said she see would see what she could do. I called the billing department at 1:30 pm today to say I need to pay for the entire $4673.00 so my son could get his hearing aids. The first person I got on the phone was Michelle and she said they did not have a copy of the bill since services was just done today but I could pay for the entire balance and if received overpayment they would just send us a check back and if there is more to be paid that they would just send us a bill. Then I was transferred to Alana in the billing department who took down our information and said she would send us a statement showing we paid for the bill.
In the end our family had to put $4673.00 on our credit card so our child can get the hearing aids he needs to hear. I thought this hospital was all about the “service to the poor”. While our family is not considered “poor” in the government’s eyes, we do not have that kind of money just lying around. Now we are also put under a more constraint to pay this off fast so we don’t have to pay interest on it. I feel we are being discriminated against because our child has a disability and we want him to be able to hear. Just because there are no note on file does not mean I did not talk to someone, I thought you reordered phone conversations, why not go back and look it up? I am so upset that we have been put through this situation that we will probably be taking our business elsewhere. We have been with this hospital since the day this child was born and have never been treated like this. I plan on contacting the media to inform them of our situation so that no other family must go through this humiliation.
The Resolution:
I received a call last night at 5:30 pm from the Medical Director of the St.Vincent Foundation apologizing for our mistreatment and she could not understand why anyone would treat us the way they did and she forwarded our information onto the correct people. Then I got an e-mail from Sue Ann Gilroy the President of the Foundation stating she forwarded it onto the correct person and it would be dealt with in a timely manner. Around 7:30 pm last night I got a phone call from Roland the Vice President of Finance for St.Vincent. We had a very good conversation and he kept apologizing for the way we were treated and could not figure out why no one would work with us and it is not St. Vincent's policy to treat anyone like that. He said he had already decided to refund our CC for the $3000.00 that the grant has agreed to pay for and when we received the check to just forward it onto him. We spoke for about an hour and at the end I asked him if he could please see about getting the remaining balance financed with Personal Finance at zero percent interest so that we would at least would be free of the interest fees and he proceeded to tell me this is the worst complaint he has seen in the six years he has been there and that St. Vincent will credit our CC for the entire amount and we would not be out of any money and he would make sure that this was taken care of first thing Monday morning. WOW!! That was not what I was expecting but did help a TON... I thanked him and said hopefully I will receive them in the mail on Saturday so Evan can have them to go to school with on Monday.Well they arrived via Fed Ex this morning around 11:00 am with everything included. Roland called me back today around 2:00 pm and he was at the hospital looking for them to bring them to us personally. He was a very nice man and again apologized for the mistreatment and said it would all be taken care of on Monday. I plan on typing him a thank-you e-mail with Evan's picture attached so he can put a face to a name. Thanks again for all encouraging words-they helped alot.
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