Some NY hospitals axed medical debt lawsuits. Which ones kept suing?

• The average amount of debt was about $5,700, an amount that could devastate some patients while offering relatively limited returns for health systems with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
• Many of the health systems that kept pursuing debt-collection lawsuits served low-income or rural communities across upstate.

A group of 17 hospitals and health systems sued about 1,600 New Yorkers to collect medical debts totaling about $9 million since early 2022, despite efforts seeking to end the controversial practice, the USA TODAY Network found.

The lawsuits — which can disrupt lives and deepen suffering for patients battling illness — came after some other hospitals halted debt-collection lawsuits during the pandemic, as advocates and lawmakers pushed measures restricting medical-debt collections, according to a review of thousands of pages of court records.

In many ways, the cases embodied patients long-standing struggle with soaring health care costs, byzantine medical billing practices and systemic inequality within private and public health insurance plans.

When asked about the lawsuits listed in court records, some hospital systems denied they filed lawsuits or pointed to the charity care they deliver each year. Others said they were phasing out the practice of suing patients over medical debt.

Among the findings:

• Many of the health systems that kept pursuing debt-collection lawsuits served low-income or rural communities across upstate.
• The average amount of debt was about $5,700, an amount that could devastate some patients financially while offering relatively limited returns for health systems with hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars in revenue per year.
• Scores of cases also ended with patient no-shows in court and default judgments in favor of hospitals. That raises questions about how patients learned of the debt collection or potential violations of state law requiring financial-aid eligibility screenings and notification.
• The hospitals that…