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I don't have figures, my hospital doesn't do the billing anymore, its done at the main branch.. The business services department was outsourced to EDS to handle the billing and collecting. So I don't know what the percentages are. I know the hospital I currently work in lost money for 10 years straight before Baylor took over and my understanding is it is still losing money. The city my Hospital is in has two parts to it and a hospital in each of those parts. the one I work in is in the old part of town. Which would consist of the poorer side of town and yes that would include immigrants (legal or illegal). I do deal with the ER a lot and yes there is a lot of hispanics that come through there. I don't know, nor do we really have a way of knowing if they are legal or not. Other than what type of identification they had.

All hospitals have to take patients that are coming in for an emergency(that is decided by the ER Admitting personal), Irregardless if they can pay a dime or not. At first we took anybody prior to 2003. In January 2003 we change this policy due to ER losing money. The ER billing is done separate by HillRom. The new policy for non-emergency patients is that you have to either pay your co-pay or pay a Medical Examination Fee of $250. This would be soften down to if you can just pay something, $1,5,10 or whatever. If you can't pay then you are given a pamplet to shows you how to get to the nearest County Hospital.

During our sign up for benefits, we were lectured on the two biggest reasons for rise in Medical Insurance. One is obvious and that is going to the ER for non-emergency problems, such as earaches. you don't know how many mothers drag in their kid at 02:00 in the morning with an earache the kid has had for 4 days. Then the mother gets pissed because she can't pay here co-pay, thus she is turned away. you well notice on your insurance that there is a big defference in the co-pay for a doctor visit, compared to an ER visit. Thus the cost of admitting a patient is more expensive in the ER than going to your Family Doctor. The second problem is being charged for something that you did not use of receive. Example, you go to your doctor's office and get checked out. What you are getting checked out usually requires an X-Ray, so the nurse checks it off. but lets say the doctor decides you don't need it. The nurse doesn't know that you didn't do the X-Ray, thus the charge remains on your file. When you go to check out and pay your co-pay, you problem don't scrutinize the bill since you are only paying $5 or 10 co-pay. even though the X-Ray may only cost $100, you mutiply that by 10,000 of insuranced people and it adds up. Things like that happen all the time.

Medical Insurance is changing so that you actually pay for the full charge using your insurance card that is tied to a health savings account that you manage. So this would put the ball in your court to scrutinize your bill to conserve how much you have in your account.