Vallejo has suspended a weeks-old program in which it
charged a $395 fee to people who had received medical care from city
firefighters.
The fee was adopted in May 2017 by a City Council looking
for ways to recoup costs, but not implemented until this August.
Officials said in a Friday statement that once the billing
program was rolled out last month “it was immediately brought to the
city’s attention that the courtesy notices sent to patients were
confusing.”
The notices, intended to inform people that their insurers
would be billed for the medical services they’d received, instead appeared as
if they were bills, the statement said.
The entire fee program was suspended effective Sept. 15.
A new letter from a billing agency, Wittman, will go out to
all patients who have received care from Vallejo firefighters since the program
started, the statement said. The letter will request information about the patient’s
insurance company, and the insurer will be billed, as was always the intention.
People without insurance should notify the billing agency of that.
Patients are not responsible for any part of the fee, the
city said, and refunds are to be paid out in the next several weeks to anyone
who paid it.
Source: NBC Bay Area
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