PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A Spokane woman is recovering in a Mexico hotel after she said she was badly injured and scammed by a hospital.
Brandi Gallagher, 34, was on vacation with friends in Cabo San Lucas when she fell on a metal spike and punctured her lung. Locals warned her against calling an ambulance, but she only learned later that it was because in Mexico, some ambulances are paid to bring people to certain hospitals.
“You think you’re gonna die and you just need help,” she told KOIN 6 News via Skype.
When Gallagher got to the hospital after 45 minutes in the ambulance, she said the staff demanded a credit card for payment before she could get treatment.
“I gave them a credit card and they said ‘OK, we’ll do x-rays,'” Gallagher said. “Well they came back and apparently I didn’t know what was going on but they were running my card to see what kind of limit the card had on it. Forty two times they ran the card to see what kind of limit they had on it.”
Gallagher told KOIN she had air in her thorax, blood in her lungs and need a chest tube in order to breathe. She was treated without anesthesia or substantial pain killers.
“They’re just jamming this into my body,” she said.
Then she described being locked in an “observation room” with no bathroom, where hospital staff could watch her. She said the hospital also contacted her friends and family, telling them she was unresponsive and unconscious and demanding thousands more dollars.
After her family contacted the consulate and got authorities involved, she was eventually released to another hospital where she received better treatment. In all, she said she paid the first hospital more than $33,000 but it tried to get more.
Last year, the U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Mexico issued a warning about predatory hospitals. It said most healthcare facilities in Mexico require payment up front, and most don’t accept U.S. health insurance. It also says some hotels and resorts have contracts with hospitals, even those that were ordered to shut down in April 2016 after they were reported for predatory business practices.
One of those hospitals was Saint Luke’s in Cabo San Lucas, the hospital Gallagher was taken to after she was injured.
Gallagher is still in Mexico waiting for her lung to heal enough to fly home.
The U.S. Consulate in Tijuana offered the following statement to KOIN 6 News,
The safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas is one of the Department’s highest priorities. Our U.S. Consulate General in Tijuana and our Consular agency in Los Cabos, Mexico assisted Brandi Gallagher who was recently hospitalized there. While consular officers are not in a position to intervene in a private legal matter, we can assist our citizens by helping them contact local authorities, as we did in this case. Ms. Gallagher was then able to arrange alternate medical care. We were happy to see this resolved, and we wish her a speedy recovery. We strongly encourage all travelers to purchase travel insurance covering emergency medical care and evacuation when traveling overseas.”
Dan Tilkin contributed to this report.