St. Mary's Health Care System

Mary Johnson

I have just had an appointment and getting ready for an angiogram. The time and care from all of the staff at the hospital and Dr Woodall's office has been remarkable. I'm not as nervous about the procedures I will be having at St. Mary's .

John Edwards

St. Mary's thinks $60 a month should go towards repaying them instead of giving me any sort of financial help as they advertise in the E.R. and of course the pricing is nuts. They claim they'll do what's right and work with lower income people, but that's just not true. Yes, I make over $24,000 a year, but with rent spiking and the cost of everything going up, life is much different than a year ago. Let's take a look: rent yearly is now $15,600 per year or $1,300 a month. That's even cheap for Athens. That'll leave me with about $8,400 for the entire year outside of rent. $8,400/12 = $700 a month. Health insurance is $75 (for garbage Ambetter), car insurance is $120, phone $80, food and household needs $120, electric/gas/water $250 and we're not counting gas for transportation yet. That's a total of $645 with $55 leftover which is already being used to pay off credit cards. I'm already hustling to just cover what I can. I also showed my credit card debt, which is going up because of the cost of living. St. Mary's only cares about their bottom line and that's very clear. Forcing me to pay $60 a month that isn't possible to pay or threatening to send me to collections isn't working with me. I have contacted St. Mary's and haven't felt like a patient once, but only a source of money. St. Mary's claims that they care and will work with you, but actions speak much louder than words. I feel like I'm dealing with a gambling bookie with the aggressive letters and constant harassing phone calls. I'm very thankful that Athens has two hospitals.

Courtney Whitley

NO EMERGENCY PEDIATRIC SURGERY. Save yourself a headache and go straight to choa if you think pediatric surgery could be necessary. My 3 year old broke his arm. Took him to St. Mary's because it was the closest hospital. I felt like the ER staff felt no sense of urgency with my screaming child with an obviously broken arm. I realize that other emergencies are worse, but there were almost no cars there and the waiting room was pretty much empty. Then rather than telling me at check-in that they don't do any pediatric surgery, they went ahead and took us in. They did an x-ray and came in and said we'd have to go to choa for pediatric surgery. They splinted it and gave pain meds. We continued to wait in a room knowing they could do nothing for us. The registration lady comes in to get insurance information and makes the comment, "I'm guessing medicaid." How inappropriate. It shouldn't matter what insurance we have. We had one really nice nurse. The doctor was okay. All he really had to say was sorry can't help you. We finally left with paperwork and disk of images. Get to CHOA, they said they didn't know we were coming. They called St. Mary's, who told them that we left against medical advice.... The medical advice was "Go to Choa" and we did what they said. Update on the billing. The patient liaison, Deedee, did call me back the next day. She apologized and got me in touch with Tonya who was able to get the bill taken care of.

M J

I keep getting bills from here even though I paid for my surgery in advance