This past week, a family from South Korea was stunned when they received a bill from the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital saying they owed more than $18,000.
Jan Yeo-im had been visiting the United States with her family back in 2015.
While staying at their hotel in San Francisco, the woman’s 8-month-old son, Park Jeong-wan, fell off the bed and hit his head.
The baby wasn’t bleeding, and his mother didn’t notice any blatant injuries, but still, he wouldn’t stop crying. Fearing he had perhaps gotten a head injury that they couldn’t see, his parents called 911.
Park Jeong-wan was transported to the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
After a brief examination, doctors quickly confirmed the baby was fine aside from a few bumps and bruises.
Although he had been considered “high risk” because of his age, he had no signs of major injury and did not receive critical care while there. Instead, he took a nap in his mother’s arms, drank a bit of baby formula and was discharged a few hours later. The visit lasted a total of 3 hours and 22 minutes.
After the family left the hospital, the incident was soon forgotten. Their vacation eventually ended, and they returned back home.
Two years later, when they finally got their bill, they were shocked to see the hospital had charged them $18,836— the vast majority of which their travel insurance refused to cover.
Jan Yeo-im cannot believe her family is being charged nearly $20,000 when her son didn’t receive any treatment. “If my baby got special treatment, okay. That would be okay,” she told Vox. “But he didn’t.”
“Why should I have to pay the bill? They did nothing for my son.”
If you look closely at the bill, you see it’s largely made up of an expense called “trauma activation”— for which the family was charged $15,666.
This is the fee hospitals charge to assemble a team of medical professionals to meet with an ER patient who may potentially have severe injuries, Vox explains. Medicare guidelines state the fee can only be charged when a patient gets at least 30 minutes of a critical care by a trauma team, but “hospitals do not appear to be following that rule when billing non-Medicare patients.”
Hospitals also seem to arbitrarily set their trauma activation fees. For example, one hospital in Missouri charges $1,112 to activate their trauma team while another in California charges fifty times that amount ($50,659). Renee Hsia, director of health policy studies in the emergency medicine department at the University of California, told Vox:
“It’s like the Wild West. Any trauma center can decide what their activation fee is.”
Hospitals will call for this service when they think a person has had a traumatic injury— but if the patient doesn’t get 30 minutes of critical care, they are supposed to downgrade the charge to a regular visit.
Hospitals would rather be safe than sorry, preferring to call doctors out to check these people rather than risk a death on their hands. But, in cases where the person doesn’t need (or receive) critical care, many people, like Jan Yeo-im, are still being charged for the service.
In response to recent headlines, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital has defended the charge.
Spokesperson Brent Andrew told Vox:
“We are the trauma center for a very large, very densely populated area. We deal with so many traumas in this city— car accidents, mass shootings, multiple vehicle collisions.”
“It’s expensive to prepare for that.”
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