New Mexico hospital refuses to treat CANCER patients unless they pay thousands up front for lifesaving treatments

Cancer patients are among the growing number of sick people across the country being asked to fork over thousands of dollars for treatments they hadn't yet received.

Nancy Skinner, 68, and nearly a dozen other cancer patients in Las Cruces, New Mexico, who say they were either denied care or required to pay out of pocket up front, leaving them to scramble for cash or move to another state where affordable care is more accessible.

Ms Skinner’s doctor ordered a biopsy in 2022 to assess a growth on her leg, but the Memorial Medical Center denied her insurance and told her she had to pay $2,000 or she would not get a potentially lifesaving procedure. She had to take out a bank loan.

Meanwhile Barbara Quarrell, 62, said that even though she had insurance, the hospital system had changed its policy to help cover the costs of cancer treatments in 2023 and would require her to pay out of pocket up front.

She ended up traveling about 200 miles to Albuquerque for her life-saving treatment: ‘They didn’t even try to take my insurance at all.’ 

Apollo Global Management, a private firm, acquired the non-profit Memorial Medical Center in 2018, and it became part of the for-profit Lifepoint Health hospital chain.

Mrs Quarrell, who was a nurse at Memorial Medical Center for 29 years, felt this change was the beginning of the end of affordable care, as for-profit entities often mean higher charges to patients.

Ms Skinner said the hospital required her to pay the fee first before undergoing the procedure. 

Then, once the results were in, she required another scan. Again, the hospital said they would not schedule it until she paid another $1,600 out of pocket.

When she asked to set up a payment plan that would relieve some of the financial burden, she was denied outright. A friend had to foot the bill.

A growing number of hospital systems across the US have begun demanding patients pay for surgeries and other services up front to avoid missed payments from the patient after. 

Around 15 percent of American households struggled to pay their medical bills in 2021, and that means hospitals are not getting paid. 

The cost to hospitals to provide care is also going up. Drugs administered in hospitals are becoming more expensive. Hospitals spent $115 billion on medications in 2023 alone. 

And hospitals' labor costs surged by over $42.5 billion between 2021 and 2023, reaching a total of $839 billion and comprising nearly 60% of the average hospital's expenses 

The massive increases that hospitals have to spend translates to massive increases in patients are demanded to pay.  

In Las Cruces, Jose A Garcia told NBC News that he was made to pay $7,000 last year by Memorial Medical Center before he could receive treatment for kidney cancer because he did not have insurance.

And Cynthia Arreola, 41, was made to pay her insurance deductible up front in order to have scans ahead of receiving treatment for her breast cancer.

She said: ‘It came down to, “If you don’t have money, you cannot have the scans or MRI.”

‘I had to have my family help me come up with that money and get my testing done so I could start my chemo.’

NBC News detailed the hospital system’s repeat denials of care, which appear to contradict state law covering the land on which the hospital operates.

Yolanda Diaz, founder of the nonprofit organization CARE Las Cruces, said: ‘When a hospital denies and delays needed health care services, it is harming residents it’s supposed to serve, creating imminent danger to life and safety.’

Per state law, denying care could violate the hospital’s lease. State law also requires hospitals to accept ‘indigent’ patients seeking care that they cannot pay for, including cancer care. 

The hospital must discuss payment plans with the patients or cost-sharing arrangements.

But in 2023, the hospital’s indigent care policy changed to exclude cancer care, having given city and county officials verbal notification, even though the hospital's lease in the past had required such a notification to be submitted in writing.

Memorial’s chief financial officer, Laura Thomas, insisted that Memorial does not turn patients away, saying that ‘many of the assertions being made about Memorial’s practices, conduct and communications with patients are factually inaccurate.’

At the same time, NBC News has handed over the names of patients who say they have hit obstacles like Ms Skinner’s and Mrs Quarrell’s, and several patients have since received apologies from hospital leadership (though no admissions of wrongdoing).

Ms Thomas said of these apologies: ‘If a person’s takeaway, from an interaction with us, was that their care was delayed or denied, we are going to do what we can to fix that.’

Hospital leadership said it has always informed the city and county governments of policy changes that would limit affordable healthcare, yet the change to the indigent care policy first discussed in 2016 did not appear in official documents until 2023.

The Las Cruces City Council has said the hospital violates its terms of agreement with the government and has invited its CEO to council meetings over the years to get answers, but he has never shown up.

Council member Becky Corran said: ‘It’s a very clear sign they don’t care about the community.’

Memorial, for its part, insisted to NBC News that it does not deny care.   

According to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Memorial charged nearly seven times more than what it cost to actually care for patients, double what nonprofit hospitals nationwide charge.

And Memorial is an outlier even among for-profit hospitals in the US, which typically charge less than five times the cost of care on average. 

Medicare costs per beneficiary at Memorial – the amount of money that the hospital asks the government to reimburse – are higher than the national average and nearly 20 percent above the state average, meaning the hospital is costing the government more money than other hospitals for a similar or lower caliber of care.

Mrs Quarrell is among several affected patients who detailed their ordeal at a city council meeting last year in an effort to force hospital leadership to take action.

Facing a pile-up of bills while living in Albuquerque for a few months to receive a long roster of chemo and radiation treatments, Mrs Quarrell applied for Medicaid, the government insurance program for poor and disabled people.

‘I was able to complete all my treatments, and I can say I’m a survivor, no thanks to the healthcare system and my community,’ she told the council.

She added, ‘I feel that after being a nurse for 29 years, I shouldn’t have to leave Las Cruces of Dona Ana County to get my treatment. All the hospitals are for-profit. I had no choice.

‘If we had hospitals that were not private, not-for-profit, it would be different because they would have to accept you as a patient.’

But given the pace at which private firms are buying up hospitals – at this point, almost a quarter of New Mexico’s hospitals are controlled by private equity firms – there is little indication that Memorial will backtrack on its policy change or that hospital acquisitions will slow down.