The Humerus Daily

PHILADELPHIA, PA—Sixteen Standardized Patients (SPs) have filed a class action lawsuit against a local medical school after each receiving over twenty medical bills following physical exams during the first-year medical student’s end-of-year Objective Structured Clinical Examinations. 

One of the SPs represented in the case, who goes by Alex Smith today, said to THD regarding this frustrating mishap, “[The university] billed my insurance for almost thirty primary care appointments over the course of three days! Naturally, my insurance denied all of them, so I’m stuck with the $3,831.67 bill.” Additionally, he claimed, “I already knew my blood pressure was high before the exams, but my abdominal pain was just acting! [These] were fake exams!”  

Mr. Smith’s insurance company did not respond to our requests for comment. The university hospital’s billing department insisted that all SPs were billed appropriately for the assessments they received. Furthermore, the billing department confirmed that if students missed certain portions of the exam, the SPs were accordingly not billed for those portions. The school’s grading policy is based on billable items, so students’ scores matched the percentage of the maximum amount that could be billed for the visit.