A Brooklyn hospital illegally billed dozens of sexual assault victims for their forensic rape examinations, an investigation by the New York Attorney General’s Office has revealed.
Between January 2015 and February 2017, the Brooklyn Hospital Center conducted 86 exams, known as rape kits. In all but one of those cases, the hospital charged the patient or the patient’s insurance company for the kit without making it clear the exam could be free, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said on Tuesday. The hospital sent at least seven of these bills to collection agencies.
“These kits are used on what is undoubtedly one of the worst days of a survivor’s life,” Schneiderman said in a news conference on Tuesday. “The absolute last thing they should have to worry about is how they’ll pay for their care at the hospital. We have found, contrary to law, that way too often they have to worry.”
New York state law requires that hospitals provide emergency care to sexual assault victims free of charge. Medical providers must either charge the state’s Office of Victim Services directly or give the patient the option to bill a private insurance company. Many rape victims prefer not to charge their private insurance companies to maintain privacy and confidentiality, Schneiderman said. Survivors pay, on average, more than $900 for emergency care, Schneiderman said.
In a settlement with Schneiderman’s office, the Brooklyn hospital has agreed to never again bill sexual assault victims for their forensic examinations. All survivors will be provided with a form explaining that they have the choice to bill the state or their private insurance for the costs. The hospital will also reimburse all patients who already paid out of pocket.
The hospital, as part of the settlement, did not admit nor deny that it violated state law. However, the hospital released a statement on Tuesday acknowledging “an inadvertent breakdown in our billing processes related to sexual assault victims, which we deeply regret.”
It has now designed processes and protocols to ensure that these billing issues do not happen again, it said in the statement. The hospital, located on Dekalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, was Brooklyn’s first hospital and serves a population of more than 1 million people.
The attorney general also is sending letters to 10 other hospitals across the state to ask for information about their policies, he said.
Schneiderman’s office began investigating in January, after a sexual assault victim complained that she had been billed a total of seven different times for her emergency care, for hundreds of dollars each time.
The patient underwent a forensic examination in the Brooklyn hospital’s emergency room in 2015. Within two months, she received two bills totaling more than $750. She contacted a victim’s assistance organization, which contacted the state Office of Victim’s Services, which told the hospital not to charge the woman.
“The hospital assured them it would not bill her again,” Schneiderman said. “But it did, again and again and again.”
“This is intolerable conduct,” he added, “and it is hard to imagine the heartbreak and anxiety that would come from having to fight a collection agency over a clearly unlawful, mistakenly charged rape kit.”
The Violence Against Women Act, reauthorized by Congress in 2005, mandates that all out-of-pocket costs of rape kits be covered by a state or other entity, in order to receive federal grants through a program called STOP.