A woman was billed $700 for a trip to the emergency room after sitting in a waiting room for 7 hours and leaving without treatment

• Taylor Davis was billed nearly $700 for an ER visit. She said she waited seven hours and wasn't seen.
• Davis, who'd gone to the ER for a head injury in July, said she was told the bill was a facility fee.

A woman said she went to an emergency room in Georgia seeking treatment for a head injury in July but was kept in the hospital waiting room for seven hours and left without being seen, the local news station WAGA reported on Friday.

A few weeks later, she received a nearly $700 bill for the visit.

"I sat there for seven hours. There's no way I should be sitting in an emergency room ... an emergency room for seven hours," Taylor Davis told WAGA, a Fox affiliate in Atlanta.

She added: "I didn't get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn't seen at all."

Convinced it was a mistake, Davis called the hospital, Emory Decatur, about the bill. She said the representative who answered the phone told her that it was hospital protocol "even if you're just walking in and you're not seen."

"When you type in your social, that's it," Davis told WAGA. "You're going to get charged regardless."

Davis said she was told the charge was an emergency-room visit fee, or facility fee, a common expense on some hospital bills to cover the facility's overhead. Ted Doolittle, a healthcare advocate in Connecticut, told NPR in 2019 that the facility fee was "somewhat akin to a cover charge" at a club.

The WAGA report said an Emory Healthcare patient-financial-services employee told Davis in an email: "You get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen."

Davis told WAGA that she was reluctant to go to the hospital for treatment again and considered it a "last resort."

"Seeing that they're able to bill you for random things, it doesn't make me want to go," Davis said. "So that's not good."

A spokesperson for Emory Healthcare said that it "has been working with the individual to address this matter, and correct inaccuracies that may have been assessed or communicated."

"Anyone who needs emergent medical care should seek a health care provider as soon as possible," the spokesperson said in an email to Insider. "Emory Healthcare, like hospitals around the country, treats all emergency room patients irrespective of their ability to pay."