HOUSTON One man was charged more than $100 to sit in a Ben Taub Hospital waiting room, even though he never saw a doctor.
Branden Schulle said he was just waiting for emergency help that never came.
I thought it might be broken. I couldn t put any kind of pressure on it, he said about his injury.
After six hours, he left in frustration, and weeks later he got the $118 bill.
Schulle said he never saw a nurse or a doctor.
I was like: What is this for? he said.
11 News took the bill to Mike Norby, the CFO of the Harris County Hospital District.
He called it an anomaly human error in a statement. Norby said the problem has been corrected and Schulle has no balance due.
In theory we should identify these and get rid of them. We should have caught this, he said.
However, Schulle said when he took the bill to customer service he got a different message.
She told me that it was standard procedure once I was checked in, and I am waiting in the waiting room, that there is a fee associated with that, he said.
That, too, is an error, the hospital said.
That was the worst part of the whole experience, Schulle said. The customer service representative should have said, Let me check that out, not offered a rote response that the bill was correct.
Schulle said that s not the treatment he expected from the hospital.
I am pretty sure that there are a lot of people out there that are being billed for things that they should not be billed for, he said.
The district said it could not immediately determine how many people may also have been erroneously billed. Ben Taub Hospital alone has more than 167,000 ER visitors each year.
