Billing

Winding up in the emergency room is bad enough. But the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that patients no longer have to worry about getting billed for emergency treatment charges that their HMOs fail to pay. Health maintenance organizations and patient advocates hailed the decision as an important protection against gouging by hospitals and physicians. But doctors said it would encourage greedy HMOs to underpay them and that that could put emergency rooms in jeopardy.

We've all found unexpected charges on our phone bills at one time or another. But nothing compares with the nearly $10,000 hit that Aliso Viejo resident Mark Elliot took from Verizon Wireless. And even though it seems pretty obvious this had to be a mistake on somebody's part, Verizon's first instinct was to stick to its guns. "We believe in the accuracy of the charges," Ken Muche, a company spokesman, told me after checking into Elliot's situation.

Federal officials have charged 20 people with fraudulent Medicare billing in seven cases that total $26 million in unneeded or undelivered medical equipment, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said Wednesday. The charges came out of a joint investigation by the FBI, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and California attorney general's office. A 30-year-old Long Beach man was arrested for allegedly recruiting relatives and members of the Brook Street Gang, based in Santa Ana, to act as owners for fake medical supply companies, which billed Medicare $11.2 million for unneeded wheelchairs and equipment.

Talk is supposed to be cheap, but it keeps getting more expensive for millions of California customers because of a 2006 regulatory change designed to do the opposite. AT&T Inc. recently jacked up the price of call waiting, caller ID and other stand-alone features, the third rate hike in the last year. Those small fee increases add up fast, and they might only get worse. The hardest hit seem to be the elderly and the poor, who are most reliant on basic phone service.

You probably didn't start your small business because you wanted the chance to master accounts receivable. Yet as any business owner knows, keeping the doors open requires getting paid for the work done or product sold. It's more important than ever, given the state of the economy. So why are so many small-business owners behind on sending out invoices or collecting what they are owed?

In late 2007, Centinela Hospital in Inglewood was losing nearly $1 million a month and had piled up $15 million in debt. Among the causes of the crisis: $25 million in overdue bills. Collecting that money would have given Centinela a measure of relief. But the bills went unpaid, and the century-old medical center was sold. The new owners slashed services, closed half the operating rooms and laid off a third of the employees. Who owed Centinela that elusive $25 million?

Loma Linda University's Behavioral Medicine Center paid more than $2 million to settle allegations that it had fraudulently overbilled federal health insurance programs, the U.S. attorney's office said. The center paid without admitting wrongdoing.

If you're one of the growing number of Americans without health insurance, you are billed top dollar for hospital care. Now, for the first time, a study purports to show just how costly that is -- although hospital groups immediately took issue with the findings.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and a contractor it hired to reduce dust on a dry lake bed in Owens Valley both have mismanaged the project's finances, resulting in as much as $4.5 million in unnecessary costs, according to a confidential audit obtained Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Unified School District allows one of its highest-ranking construction managers to run a side business supplying consultants to the $20-billion school-building program and, in some cases, to act as the prime watchdog over the accuracy of the hours they bill. In one case, records show that Bassam Raslan, L.A.