Dear Amir,
thank you so much for your prompt answer. To obtain more advice, I would like to clarify the situations a bit.
Yes, I invited her to come to visit, otherwise she would never have got her visa to US, you need an invitation letter for that. But she had the means to come for her own expenses mostly. So I guess that complicates the answer to questions 2&3. I would believe there will be a lot of difficulties for the hospital in trying to pinpoint from where she came and how to link her to me legally..
Frankly, I do not feel well of not paying someone for the services they rendered. However, when confronting something like this bill for essentially no services - you are in the position of a person who is being robbed and is trying to avoid it.
Thank you again
Ant
Dear Ant2001,
It makes more sense that I answer your questions 2 & 3 first.
The only time I have seen hospitals (or other providers) go after the US resident relative of a foreign national who had unpaid emergency room bills was if the foreign national visitor obtained their US visa based on the sponsorship of that US resident relative. In other wards if you did not provide sponsorship to your relative that was used to obtain US visa, you are not likely to be liable. That means most likely this $4000 bill will never get paid. Unfortunately this is not rare & a good percentage of ER patients don't end up paying their bills which in turn adds to the overhead of the ER. This phenomenon results in much higher fees for services that can be obtained for a fraction in a non-emergency clinic that doesn’t deal with non-paying patients. So the answer to your question 1 is, “yes, ER does charge an insane amount of money for services to cover the overhead & all the other unpaid bills!
Sincerely,
Amir Mostafaie