Payment gets worked out later.
That's changing, too. My local regional hospital system used to work with people on payment plans. Not anymore. Without announcing it they went to a "90 days or it goes to collections" plan, and even those people who were making payments, and were not behind, had their accounts sent to collections, with no warning or notification whatsoever.
Now our local hospital system is owned and run by people who have already managed to piss off most of the region with their greediness - they posted record profits for 2009 and the board of directors promptly voted a 5-10% hike in fees across the board - but I can't imagine that there aren't other hospital systems doing the same thing, particularly the ones owned by systems that have bought up or out all the local smaller clinics and GPs.
Let's call it what it is, OK? Sheer, conscience-less, unmitigated greed by people for whom a fifty thousand dollar hospital bill is pocket change, and who have no problem lobbying, bullying and pushing our lawmakers into ensuring that the profit comes their way.
The ironic part of that is that those people don't understand the difference between feeding off of a host and killing said host. Or having said host go to desperate measures to kill it's parasite. Fools.
SB