“For almost three decades, Barbara Quarrell cared for patients as a nurse in Las Cruces, New Mexico, working for many years at Memorial Medical Center, a nonprofit community hospital owned by the city and the county,” Gretchen Morgenson writes for NBC. “So when she received a devastating cancer diagnosis in 2022, she headed to Memorial for treatment. ‘That’s my hospital,’ she told NBC News. ‘My people are there.’ Memorial is now operated as a for-profit facility by Lifepoint Health, a hospital chain backed by private equity, and it had other plans for her, Quarrell said. When her doctor called to schedule chemotherapy, the facility asked about her health insurance. She was covered by True Health New Mexico, a marketplace plan under the Affordable Care Act for which she paid $800 a month. No go, Memorial said, according to her doctor’s contemporaneous notes, which Quarrell provided to NBC News. Quarrell and her husband quit their jobs and relocated to Albuquerque, more than 220 miles north, where she received treatment at a facility that took her insurance. ‘They didn’t even try to make it work,’ she said of Memorial. ‘What happened to being humane and taking care of each other?’ Quarrell is not alone. … Eleven other cancer patients and seven current and former Memorial clinicians described a facility in which both insured and uninsured patients requiring an array of treatments were regularly met with denials of care or demands for up-front payments. Doctors’ contemporaneous notes confirmed some of these allegations, including those of an additional patient who subsequently died. Three patients gave Memorial permission to discuss their cases with NBC News.” Gretchen Morgenson, “Cancer patients say this hospital turned them away,” NBC News.
