Both my husband I were hit by a car on October 6, 2018 in Hurricane, Utah. We were pedestrians. We were both unconscious for hours. When I woke up, I was in a room at the Dixie Regional Medical Center hospital at St. George, Utah. I did not know where my husband was sent. Later on I found out that my husband was transferred from there to a Las Vegas hospital, since Dixie Hospital could not deal with his injury. The hospital did not cooperate – they would not allow me to call long distance and make calls on my behalf. (My phone died because I did not have access to a charger.) For about ~2 weeks, I did not know the whereabouts of my husband. Finally a doctor in the hospital where my husband had heart surgery (resulting from the accident) contacted me before the surgery and filled in the details about him. This caused a great deal of anxiety as I could not talk to my husband.
The hospital clearly neither care about the anxiety that I was going through nor cooperated in locating my husband.
My questions to the owner of the hospital are:
1) We have a good health insurance coverage. Dixie Regional Medical
Center is a member of that organization. However, instead of submitting the bill directly to the insurance company (which all other hospitals did), this particular hospital instead put a Hospital lien (with no details) to us. What is the reason? Collect more from us? Dixie, however, were getting regular approval (almost every other day) from my insurance company prior to extending my stay there. So they knew how to contact the insurance company and the coverage under the policy.
2) The nurses, physical and the occupational therapists were nice. But, the social worker was mean. One day she suddenly asked me whether I could pay $25:00 without any explanation. Later a doctor told me that I had to move to a guest house (near the hospital). Later I found out that the guest house was for those who could not afford to stay at the hospital and had to pay $25 for the first night stay there. This is preposterous as I had more than enough funds to pay for the costs incurred at the hospital. They were not up front with me for my move to the guest house. I could not stay at the guest house anyway as I was dealing with multiple fractures and could not move without wheelchair.
3) A few days later, the social worker asked me, again without explanation,
whether I could pay $69. Later I found out that my husband arranged a transfer from Dixie to a rehabilitation hospital in Las Vegas, and the transportation fee was $69. This was not made transparent to me causing anxiety.
4) Someone, left a note for me that my husband’s IPhone was found that he had lost before he was transferred to Nevada. But, nobody could locate where it was. I could hear his IPhone ringing for a few days, and
then the battery of his phone died. Eventually we lost the iPhone.
This is preposterous. The staff did not cooperate in locating the phone.
