Healthcare

For Tenet Healthcare Corp., collecting on debts is far more profitable than trying to cure sick people. A feature in Bloomberg BusinessWeek delves into how Tenet is selling hospitals because they aren’t profitable, but keeping those facilities as clients of Conifer, a revenue cycle management company, which has profit margins …

Better, a company that works with individuals to “get back the money their health insurance owes them,” has purchased and forgiven $1 million of medical debt for several hundred Californians. A report promoting the act did not mention how much the company spent to acquire the $1 million of debt. …

Collection agencies were involved in attempting to recover the cost of administering rape kits at hospitals, even though the exams are supposed to be free of charge. A hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., billed patients or their health insurance providers in 85 of 86 instances where a forensic rape exam was …

Medical debt is forcing more and more older Americans into filing for bankruptcy protection. While still making up only a small percentage of all bankruptcy filers, more Americans over the age of 65 are filing for protection and medical debt is listed as the number one reason. The fact that …

The amount that healthcare facilities are collecting up front before service has provided has more than tripled in the past six years and the overall amount of accounts receivable has decreased, but there still are many collection-related concerns facing hospitals, according to results of a survey that were released today. …

BillingTree has launched its second annual Healthcare Operations & Technology survey. Interested participants can participate in the survey by clicking here. The payment processor also announced it is holding a webinar on December 13. The topic for the webinar is: Patient Receivables – Who Are The People In Your Care. Participants …

Fumiko Chino seems uniquely suited to talk about the financial effects on an individual’s healthcare. Now a radiation oncologist at Duke University who is studying the impact of financial strain on cancer patients, she was once the young girlfriend of a man who was diagnosed with an aggressive form of …

A Texas woman was receiving calls from debt collectors over an unpaid medical bill. The problem? The bill was for a sexual assault examination after she claimed she had been attacked by a co-worker. Texas state law says that police departments and other law enforcement agencies must cover the cost …

Collectly, a debt collection technology start-up, has raised $1.9 million in seed funding. The company aims to help healthcare providers collect bills using technology beyond the telephone and printed letters. The company is working on partnerships with Athena Health and DrChrono to reach its goal of signing up 100,000 healthcare …

Even though nothing has become official yet, if the Republicans are successful at adopting their own healthcare legislation, it is expected that the number of individuals without health insurance will increase, largely because of reductions in Medicaid funding. Medicaid has intended to be a healthcare program for individuals and families with …