A Toronto-area man says he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay the $41,000 bill from a local hospital that cared for his wife for more than two years.
Two years ago, Jai Kumar’s wife of 44 years, Georgina, had a stroke and was sent to Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital. The stroke left her disabled and Kumar told hospital staff he would not be able to care for his wife at home.
"I said, ‘It's just impossible for me to keep her home. I don't have the facilities and she needs 24-hour care’," Kumar told CTV Toronto.
So instead, she spent almost two years at the hospital. In February, the hospital told Kumar that a bed at a long-term care facility had become available for his wife. But Kumar had concerns about the facility and turned it down.
The hospital informed Kumar that it would have no choice but to start charging his wife $1,200 a day.
Kumar eventually found another long-term care spot for his wife a month later but by then, the bill from the hospital had grown to more than $41,300.Kumar says he has been told that the hospital expects him to pay the bill in full, but he doesn’t have the money.
“(It’s) so depressing. I don’t have any other income. We are on a fixed income,” he said.
Allison Trenhom, the director of communications marketing and stewardship at MacKenzie Health, would not comment on any case directly, to protect patient confidentiality. But she did tell CTV News that in general, discussions about a discharge and a patient’s next phases of care take place “throughout their stay,” and that the hospital offers patients and families support in their planning.
“When a patient and/or family member refuses to leave the hospital and transition to home or a long-term care home they have selected, a patient is invoiced the standard provincial non-insured resident daily rate,” Trenhom said, adding that families are informed of this both in meetings and in writing.
Charging for a bed is done only in “very rare circumstances” when a patient or their family has “rejected every effort to facilitate safe and appropriate discharge,” she said.
With a report from CTV Toronto’s Pat Foran
