The High Cost of Being Injured in San Francisco

The cost of medical care rendered to seriously injured accident victims in San Francisco is tremendous, especially given the high cost of treatment at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), to which seriously injured patients are brought by ambulance, and the fact that SFGH and its physician group balance bill the patient for whatever their insurance does not cover.
In San Francisco, accident victims who are believed to be seriously injured are almost always brought by paramedic transporters to the emergency trauma center at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). For many of these victims, the care rendered in the ER is followed by some number of days of inpatient hospital stay. While the SFGH trauma center is widely believed to do excellent work, the cost can be staggering. As I regularly see in my work as a San Francisco personal injury lawyer, the costs often amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While one may think that those victims covered by medical insurance have nothing to worry about in terms of being personally indebted for the

hospital bills, that is unfortunately incorrect. For those individuals covered by PPO medical insurance plans, SFGH, and their professional physicians group called SFGH Medical Group, can, and do, “balance bill” the patient for whatever amount their insurance does not pay SFGH. They can do this because they do not contract with any health insurer for emergency related medical services.

Patients are usually shocked to learn of this (and they often first learn of this long after they are discharged from the hospital) and consider it grossly unfair that this can happen despite their having medical insurance and despite the fact that they were not given a choice, or at least an informed choice, as to which hospital they were brought to. This balance billing practice has thus far been upheld by the courts, except where the patient belongs to an HMO or one of a few other specific types of medical plans.