Hospital Settles Suit Over Billing Contracts in English

Mission Community Hospital in Panorama City has settled a lawsuit with a Spanish-speaking house painter who signed papers he didn’t fully understand holding him liable for his father’s medical bills.

The suit, filed two years ago by Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County and the Western Center on Law and Poverty, contended that Pedro Perez couldn’t understand the English-language documents.

His father died at the hospital in April 1997. A year later, Perez received a $13,000 hospital bill. He subsequently learned that his father would have been eligible for state-funded insurance.

In 1999, shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the hospital agreed to waive the bill. But terms of the settlement will benefit other families of patients at Mission Community Hospital, officials said.

The hospital won’t try--in situations like Perez’s--to collect from patients who signed third-party liability agreements within the last six years, said David Pallack, an attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services.

The hospital also agreed to other changes, which were made last year. Those include:

* Signs posted in English and Spanish about the availability of interpreters to discuss patient care and payments or billing.

* Signs in both languages about free and low-cost health care and how to apply for it.

* Improved written agreements that cover third-party liability. The statements describe care that will be provided regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. Perez said he had feared his father wouldn’t receive treatment if Perez didn’t sign.

The new agreements make it clear that “as a family member you are not obliged to sign for financial coverage for another family member,” said Bill Daniel, chief executive of Mission Community Hospital.

“We have worked at our quality. We’ve been making every effort to be a first-rate community hospital,” Daniel said. “We accepted this as a deficiency and something wrong and we moved quickly to correct it. Hospitals are imperfect institutions. We have to constantly strive to improve ourselves.”

Perez, who also received $5,000 in damages, said through a translator he was pleased “the hospital made changes because it will now benefit a lot of people.”

Jane Perkins, director of legal affairs for the National Health Law Program, said many hospitals that receive federal funding such as Medicaid or Medicare are not providing the multilingual services that civil rights laws require of them. But the Perez case and Mission Community Hospital, she said, are evidence that awareness of the law is growing.