My [adult] son had some relatively minor surgery at his local hospital. They only used “Twilight anesthesia” during the procedure but still wanted him to be admitted overnight for observations as a precaution. During the night he did not receive any drugs whatsoever.
In the morning (7am) he was up, feeling great, ready to go. They told him he couldn’t leave until the doctor came in and saw him and then officially released him.
So he waited. And waited. And waited. Hours went by and no doc. Every half hour he called the nurse in and demanded to see a doctor (ANY doctor) to get released. But there were emergencies and such so no doctors were available.
Finally, at noon, he said “STRAIGHT TO HELL WITH THIS HORSESHIT! I’VE GOT THINGS TO DO!”:mad: (according to my daughter in-law this is a direct quote) and told them he was simply walking out.
To which they told them if he left without being released his insurance company would not pay anything for his procedure. He picked up the phone and told them he was calling his attorney. Less than a minute later, voila, some doctor came into the room, signed a piece of paper, and told him he could go. He should have said that at 7:30 I guess:rolleyes:.
So what’s the deal here? Would the insurance really not pay had he left on his own? How long could these pricks delay his release with no medical reason without losing a law suit? To the best of my knowledge he did not actually contact an attorney over this. Should he?
It sounds like the hospital wasn’t actually preventing him from leaving; they were just advising him to stay until formally discharged because his insurance company requires this in order to cover the costs. Whether or not this is actually true depends on the contract he has with the insurance company, but it sounds like a very reasonable provision to me—if I were paying for someone’s medical treatment, I’d certainly want confirmation from the medical staff that they actually saw it through to completion rather than leaving halfway through. He always had the option of leaving, though if he did so before being discharged, he would be on the hook for the bill. The hospital was trying to save your son money, and (from the way you tell the story) he acted like an impatient, selfish dick. He felt his need complete some routine paperwork took priority over people with real medical emergencies.
The same thing happened to my wife: a minor medical procedure with no problems, then the doctor disappeared. Hours later she finally signed herself out AMA (againt medical advice), and yes, the insurance company raised a huge stink about her leaving wihtout being released by a doctor.
Your son’s beef is with the physician in charge of his case, who seems to have neglected follow-up, rather than with the hospital staff who insisted on following procedure.
It’s easy to say that he was forcing the prioritization of his paperwork over some emergency - but the truth as I see it is that the hospital was saving money by being understaffed and he refused to cave and be conveniently cowed.
If the hospital didn’t have enough people to sign him out, then they also didn’t have enough people to notice early and respond appropriately if he took a turn for the worse.
I mean, unless there was an earthquake or a 60-car pile-up on the freeway, one should be able to expect a Doctor to be available to meet one’s most routine needs within the hour at a minimum.
I can agree with the hospital. My mother has mental problems and was in a hospital and signed herself out. Her insurance company refused to pay for the stay. I had to go through a lot with them convincing them she isn’t competent, and that she’s been in and out of mental hosptials most of her life. They eventually paid up, but it’s understandable.
As for the hosptial taking it’s time, it could be neglect or it could be that there were more important people to be seen to.
In a side note, in one of my temporary jobs I’m doing it had me plotting hosptials on a map, so I was reading a lot of notes. I came across this, in Illinois, Blue Cross will not pay for any medical procedure performed in a hospital, that is built without a certificate of need by the state.
This is why in Illinois private hospitals have trouble getting built while across the border in Indiana you have small private hosptials, because Indiana doesn’t require it. Of course if you go to Indiana and one of those hospitals and you have Blue Cross they won’t pay.
I had a similar issue years ago when my pre-teen daughter had appendicitis. She had no fever, was eating and eliminating, walking around well, bored out of her mind after 3 days. They kept telling me I had to wait until she was officially signed out.
I was pretty cranky after 3 nights of very little sleep (the young person in the next bed was on an asthma machine that beeped really loud about every 45 minutes). I told my daughter to go ahead and get dressed, we were going home. Then I went to the desk and said they had 10 minutes to get a doctor or a patient representative in there, and that at the end of that time we were leaving one way or the other. I mean, it’s not a prison, right? It’s not as if she was receiving any actual treatment – no antibiotics or pain meds were needed. Five minutes later the M.D. was there, pissed off as hell.
I find these things so odd – on the one hand some patients are being told they may NOT go home, but it took an act of Congress IIRC to legislate that women giving birth had to be allowed the option of an entire 24 hours of care after delivery.
She said he was stuck there for hours. You are responding as if it were a few minutes. And I do trust them to prioritize their work; to include leaving a healthy patient stuck for hours when more urgent needs would otherwise be unmet due to short staffing.
I have no cite, but I think the provision that the “insurance won’t pay” would only come into effect if he got home, some complications happened, and then he had to go back for more treatment above and beyond what would have been needed BECAUSE he ignored medical advice and checked out early.
I can’t see a legal reason why they could refuse to pay for the initial treatment for skipping out early.
And, I’m on the OPs side here. Hospitals are not prisons. If I want to leave, then the doctor had damned well better get his ass up there in less than 4 1/2 hours. But then again, other patients have more pressing needs than my, “I want to go home.”
You can (this is GQ) look to our tort system for the reason for extra caution.
The cynical side of me tends to think that if the doctor doesn’t get around to seeing the patient until close to noon, and the patient isn’t released until just after noon, the hospital gets to charge for 2 days rather than just one.
But an organization wouldn’t actually do that, right?
That was my first thought. I had a similar experience several years ago. I was ready to be released in the morning, but it around 5pm before a doctor showed up.
No, and they won’t charge you $8 for a single ibuprofen either.
snort
Count me as another who see this as a cheap way to get an extra day’s stay out of patients. If that hospital is so damn busy that a doctor can’t take the 5 minutes to stop into a room and see that a post-op patient with no complications is ready to go the hell home, then something is badly wrong with their staffing and management, and I would pick a new place to go to in the future. Short a major traffic, environmental, or industrial accident, there is no excuse whatsoever for that sort of “oh, you’re not important, we’ll get to you eventually, just sit there and wait helplessly while we *charge *you for that bed you’re in that you don’t even want to be in.”
I don’t think I would have even waited that long. If I’m cleared for discharge except for a glance and a signature from someone in a white coat, after an hour or so, I’m calling the nurse, and informing them that my attorney is going to be sending them a bill for my time.
When I worked on a Medical-surgical unit, one of the things that made me want to scream was doctors who would poke a head into a patient’s room and say something like " you can go home today" or “if your X test is ok, you can go home” but then they would disappear for 5 or 6 hours and not sign the paperwork for discharge. Nurses have to enter all the information for discharge while also doing med rounds, answering calls, doing patient care and updating charts. Some days can be challenging, to say the least; with patients telling me “Dr X said I could go home!” It would take me about 30 to 40 minutes to do discharge papers , with usually 2 or 3 interruptions for patient’s calls. It ain’t an easy job.
I can’t blame the patients for wanting to get out of the hospital. When I’ve been in the hospital I couldn’t wait to get out, either.
This is because you know neither the OP’s jurisdiction, nor the provisions of the contract between the patient and the insurance company. If the contract says no payment when skipping out early, and the jurisdiction has no law nullifying such a provision, then there is indeed a legal reason why they can refuse to pay.
I would rewrite your post as
If that hospital is so damn busy that a doctor can’t take the 5 minutes to stop into a room and see … a … patient [for 4.5 hours and he had to threaten a lawsuit to even get that], then something is badly wrong with their staffing and management, and I would pick a new place to go to in the future.
That’s fair. I can only speak from my personal experiences. I had a sleep study done several years ago, and I could not fall asleep. Around 4am, the nurse came in and said that even if I fell asleep now, they couldn’t get enough data and I would need to come back. I said that since I had to come back again, I might as well go home. She told me the same thing, that I had to stay until 6am, or else my insurance wouldn’t pay. I told her she was crazy and that I wasn’t going to stay for 2 more hours when I had to come back anyways.
So later I called my insurance company and I was told that they hear this all of the time, and it is not true. They don’t know where it started or how it became so prevalent, but leaving early will not deny you coverage.
Maybe some jurisdictions would uphold such a ridiculous provision were it in the insurance contract, but I would think that a decent lawyer could have a number of lines of attack if they tried to refuse all payments.