Tuesday's Number: $725,372

Tuesday is the day my local paper, The Post-Standard, publishes the weekly business section. In addition to special features, tips from stock experts, budgeting advice and the like, we get the judgment and bankruptcy listings.

This is the fourth full year I’ve been tracking these numbers – I captured part of the year in 2012 – and the third year that I’ve captured filings by hospital.  I include anything that is likely a patient debt owed to a hospital, nursing home, physician or physician group, medical supplier, and so on; I do not include filings by insurance companies, many of which are so diversified it would not be a fair assumption that the filing is related to medical care or health insurance.

In the first three years, the overall total was $67,965,862 – a staggering amount of money for a relatively small metropolitan area that includes the city of Syracuse and her suburbs, the towns and villages of Onondaga County, and to a lesser extent, some of the even smaller neighboring counties, towns and villages. 

As I reported in the 2015 recap, we turned sharply down last year – some $7M – and the hope is that we will continue to see progress in the overall total.  Of course, a better sign of health would be an increase in the number of satisfied judgments; people’s ability to pay off their debt (or their willingness, as the case may be) is something else I’m hoping to see this year.  

This week was not so good, by any of the measures I hope for. There were 

• 30 new judgments to hospitals, doctors, or other medical providers, totaling $725,372
• no satisfied judgments and
• no bankruptcies, which I guess is our silver lining this week.

Here’s the breakdown by hospital:

• Crouse had nine, totaling $266,889
• St. Joes had one, for $74,197
• SUNY Upstate had 17, totaling $362,572

Two local medical practices affiliated with SUNY Upstate ($8,228 and $7,609) and a New Jersey hospital ($5,877) account for the rest.

The paper publishes only those accounts of at least $5,000.