Uninsured sue Catholic Healthcare West:

Lawyers representing three uninsured Latinos filed a class-action suit Tuesday against Catholic Healthcare West hospitals, alleging price-gouging of patients without health coverage.

The suit claims the San Francisco-based health care provider with 40 hospitals in California, Nevada and Arizona, including St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, routinely charges uninsured patients up to five times the amount paid by private insurers and government programs for the same services.

The suit seeks to force Catholic Healthcare West to reform billing practices in the three states and reimburse the three Latino plaintiffs a woman immigrant from El Salvador and two Mexican-Americans.

"What’s fair about paying three to five times more?" lawyer Archie Lamb said at a news conference. "The working poor are being run into bankruptcy by this payment system."

Catholic Healthcare West issued a statement saying it "was proud of our record of serving those in need, regardless of their ability to pay."

I saw a TV news thing on this a few months ago – Here’s a related WaPo story from August

At the core of the fight to help the indigent is a Byzantine billing system in which hospitals start with one standard set of prices and then give deep discounts to government purchasers and private insurers. The result: People without insurance are the only ones charged full price, often triple what insured customers pay.

Hospitals say that negotiating bulk discounts for major buyers is simply the free-market system at work. But advocates for the poor, a well-financed coalition of trial lawyers and a growing number of lawmakers argue the system is so out-of-whack that it amounts to a violation of consumer protection laws.

"It is illegal to charge [uninsured patients] three, four and five times what they charge other people," said Archie Lamb, a Birmingham lawyer handling several of the cases. "It is price gouging, and it is unfair."

At Florida Hospital, a standard appendectomy costs Medicare about $4,000 and private insurers $4,572, Lamb said. A patient without insurance would be charged $13,000 to $15,000 for the same surgery, he said.