UCHealth sues thousands of patients every year. But you won’t find its name on the lawsuits.

AURORA — The ring sparkled: 18-karat white gold, double-banded, with a 1.5-carat diamond at its center.

It was the ring that Cathy Woods-Sullivan’s late husband had given to her on their wedding day, a family heirloom. Other than their two teenage daughters, it was the most precious thing she had left.

She handed it forward to the pawnbroker feeling sick to her stomach.

He looked at her, then at the ring, then back up at her.

“I’m going to hold onto it for a little while,” he said.

“Diagnosis: Debt Colorado” is a reporting partnership among KFF Health News, the Colorado News Collaborative, The Colorado Sun, 9News, Colorado Newsline and The Sentinel exploring the scale, impact, and causes of medical debt in Colorado. The ongoing series branches from KFF Health News’s award-winning reporting on medical debt in the United States.

But Woods-Sullivan knew she wouldn’t be back.

She needed the money to pay off a debt to UCHealth, Colorado’s largest hospital system, one that collects more than $6 billion a year in revenue from patient care. 

“We improve lives,” UCHealth touts in its mission statement.

But this same system sues thousands of its patients like Woods-Sullivan every year, according to a 9News/Colorado Sun investigation done in partnership with the Colorado News Collaborative and KFF Health News. 

What’s more, many of these lawsuits are shielded from public scrutiny through a system in which collection companies working with UCHealth file lawsuits in their own names. Taken together, UCHealth and these companies filed 15,710 lawsuits from 2019 through 2023, UCHealth revealed in response to questions from 9News and the Colorado Sun. That is an average of 3,142 lawsuits per year, or more than eight per day.

In the last four years, virtually none of the lawsuits have been filed in UCHealth’s name.

“They are essentially deliberately using those third-party collection agencies to obscure the fact that they are the ones suing the patients,” said Adam Fox, the deputy director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, a consumer-advocacy group that helps patients in disputes over medical bills. “It makes it really hard for the patient to untangle.”

One of these debt collection companies working for UCHealth sued Woods-Sullivan over a debt from an emergency visit for chest pains. She tried at first to fight in court, then eventually entered into a payment plan to settle the case.

But when the stress of arguing with the debt collector over how much she still owed after every check was too much, she decided she just wanted to be done.

She looked through her house for something she could sell.

“It was beautiful, beautiful,” she said of her ring. “But I had to do what I had to do. I was tired of getting the runaround.

“It was all I had.”

Woods-Sullivan owed UCHealth $1,634.34.

The health system, which as a nonprofit community institution is exempt from paying taxes, recorded $839 million in total profits last year.