NOT TRUE: Leaving the hospital A.M.A (Against Medical Advice) will cost you

I heard this piece of Marketplace tonight on my way home and felt
compelled to share

Can ignoring medical advice hurt your wallet?

by JOHN SCHUMANN

Kai Ryssdal: Largely lost in all the talk about the health care law is
that a lot of things haven't really changed yet. Most of its
provisions are going to phase in over time, which means millions of
people still don't have health insurance and health care costs
continue to climb.Commentator and physician John Schumann says
conventional wisdom among his peers is sometimes responsible for those
rising costsJohn Schumann: Nora, a third-year medical student, came to
me in distress. Ms. DiFazio, one of the patients on her hospital
rotation, was frightened to undergo an invasive and expensive medical
procedure in which a catheter would be inserted into the heart to test
whether she had heart disease.

At the bedside, the doctor Nora was shadowing demanded to know why Ms.
DiFazio refused the procedure. When no reason beyond "I don't want to"
was offered, the doctor told Ms. DiFazio that there was no longer any
reason for her to stay in the hospital.

But by declining the procedure, he informed her she would have to sign
out 'against medical advice' or AMA. She would have to acknowledge
that leaving AMA could result in serious harm or death. And that she
would bear responsibility for all hospital charges not reimbursed by
insurance because of her decision.

"The threat of a huge hospital bill got Ms. DiFazio to stay and take
the test," Nora told me. "It just seems so wrong to bludgeon a patient
this way," she said. "Can it possibly be true?" Ethically, the notion
that patients must do our bidding or pay the price seemed dubious. Yet
in a world of co-pays, deductibles, and "preexisting conditions," the
idea seemed plausible.

To find out for sure, I elicited the help of some colleagues and we
sifted through nearly 10 years of discharges against medical advice
from our teaching hospital. Out of the hundreds of cases we examined,
not one resulted in an unpaid bill because of the AMA discharge.

I also went to source and talked with folks from some of the nation's
largest private insurance companies. Each of them told me that the
idea of a patient leaving against medical advice and having to foot
the bill is bunk: nothing more than a medical urban legend.

So patients beware: The next time you or your loved one has decided
that it's time to leave the hospital, don't let us doctors coerce you
into staying by threatening you with the bill. It simply isn't true.

Ryssdal: Dr. John Schumann specializes in internal medicine at the
University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine in Tulsa.

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