Hospital to Pay $5,000 in Third-Party Form Snafu

Mission Community Hospital in Panorama City has settled a lawsuit with a Spanish-speaking house painter who signed papers he did not fully understand that later held him liable for his elderly father’s medical treatment.

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 was not able to understand the hospital documents he signed for his father’s care because they were in English and his primary language is Spanish.

His father died at the hospital in April 1997, shortly after being admitted. A year later, Perez received a bill for $13,000 from Mission Community. When he contacted legal services he 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 the settlement, reached April 20, can benefit many non-English speaking patients at Mission Community Hospital, officials said.

The hospital will not try to collect from patients who like Perez signed third-party liability agreements within the last six years, said David Pallack, an attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County.

In addition, he said, the hospital agreed to the following changes in operations completed last year:

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

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

* Improved written agreements involving third-party liability that describe care that will be provided regardless of the patient’s ability to pay.

Perez said he was fearful that if he didn’t sign the papers his father wouldn’t receive treatment. The new forms clarify patient coverage.

They 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 an interpreter that he was pleased the hospital made changes that will now benefit many other people.

Jane Perkins, director of legal affairs for the National Health Law Program, said many organizations that receive federal funding, such as Medicaid or Medicare, are not providing the multilingual services required of them in civil rights laws.

But the case of Perez and Mission Community Hospital is evidence that awareness of the law is growing. Patients are a multicultural and multilingual population, Perkins said.