High pill bill miffs senior

LITTLE ROCK — Marcia Kantorwitz knows what it’s like to hound people for unpaid bills.

“I was the one who called you if you didn’t pay your bill,” Kantorwitz said, explaining her old job with a music record distributor in the Midwest. “I would say, you’ve got to pay something or we can’t fill your order.”

But these days, Kantorwitz, an 86-year-old widow who lives in suburban West Palm Beach, finds herself on the other side of the transaction.

It all started two Octobers ago when Kantorwitz had trouble breathing and ended up spending a night at Wellington Regional Medical Center.

Medicare paid for nearly all of the $6,000 bill. But Kantorwitz was left with a $272.76 charge for some medications she received while in the hospital. Kantorwitz was shocked by the charges.

The $115.52 charge for a single cholesterollowering pill seemed like a mistake.

“One tablet should cost about $5,” she said.

She went through the list, and it made her angry. An aspirin tablet cost $6.52; a blood pressure pill was billed at $4.76-far greater than the 7-cents-per-tablet cost she was used to paying. An anti-depressant tablet was billed at $13.95.

“A 90-day supply of them at Costco costs $18.62,” she said.

So Kantorwitz called the hospital for an explanation.

“I’m not crying poverty, but I felt they were taking advantage of me,” Kantorwitz said. “Somepeople might go to the bank and take out their last bit of money to pay this, but not me.”

Kantorwitz lives off her Social Security income, which is about $1,100 a month. When you take away the nearly $500 she pays in maintenance fees at her home, plus phone, electric and the $2,000-a-year cost of the auto insurance policy on her 8-year-old car, there’s not a lot of wiggle room.

She’s gradually eating away at the modest nest egg of stocks she has.

“At this point, I’m just hoping what I have will last me,” she said.

And so she decided to fight the hospital bill. Or at least, make it more reasonable.

“I went in and offered them $100,” Kantorwitz said.

The hospital refused.

“When you try to compare costs of medications purchased from a pharmacy or supermarket with that of a hospital, you’re not talking apples to apples,” said Marsha Israel, the marketing director at Wellington Regional Medical Center. “Hospitals have overhead costs that private retailers do not, such as the costs of paid health careprofessionals that administer the medications and monitor patients 24 hours per day.”

In July, Kantorwitz got a letter from an Illinois collection agency telling her to pay the full $272.76 or explain why she thought it wasn’t valid.

“I do not think I am being unreasonable in my refusing to pay for their markup,” Kantorwitz wrote back. “Now I will not even give them the $100 I offered to settle.”