For 12 years, like clockwork, Claretha Singleton drove from St. Helena Island to Naval Hospital Beaufort, S.C., flashed her veteran-dependent identification card at the pharmacy and picked up the prescriptions she needs to live.
Singleton, the widow of Vietnam veteran William Singleton, has some Veterans Affairs Department medical benefits because of his service. And since 2006, those benefits included medication for her blood pressure, thyroid problems and cholesterol.
Her routine came crashing down last November when the hospital told her it had made a mistake the entire time. She wasn’t eligible for the medication at a Defense Department hospital, it said in a letter, and the eventual bill it sent totaled $10,630.29.
“I didn’t sleep for weeks,” Singleton, 69, told The Washington Post on Thursday, after her story was first reported by the Island Packet. “I just can’t believe that they know they made this mistake, and I’m totally at fault, as if they have no obligation.”
No hospital staffers could explain the problem, and they only offered nice but ultimately unhelpful sympathy, Singleton said. They told her a bill would come, but her mailbox yielded no bad news on that front for months.
Then on Aug. 28, her worst fears were realized. The bill arrived late — nine months after the first notification of an issue — but she only had one month to pay, the letter said, or face increasingly harsh penalties.
About $8,000 was from the prescription costs, she said, and the rest was interest for a charge she never knew existed, and fees the hospital acknowledges accumulated in error. Singleton paid the fees using a bank loan to avoid penalties.
The hospital was, in a relative sense, a tiny bureaucracy compared to the one that could decide to grant an exemption.
“Can you imagine? My only recourse is the Pentagon? Me. The Pentagon,” Singleton said, laughing at the idea of a retired college financial aid director taking on the Defense Department.
“At first I just sat there,” she said. “But now I have this resolve to keep fighting.”
Federal law requires reimbursement if a patient receives military care they were not eligible for, Navy Medicine spokesman Ed Gulick said. Patients can dispute charges and ask for a waiver, but only Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer or his personnel chief can grant that decision, he said.
Singleton sent a letter to Spencer requesting a waiver, Gulick confirmed, but could not elaborate on its status, citing privacy concerns.
Her request comes after battles of a much different nature.
Singleton married her husband in 1971, a few years after he was drafted by the Army for his combat tour, she said. She was drawn to his pleasant disposition, but those early years of marriage were a challenge. The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” did not enter the public lexicon until the 1980s.
“I didn’t know anything about PTSD. I was young. He was young,” she said. “There was a lot of drinking and trying to forget.”
William Singleton was granted 100 percent disability by VA, but his Agent Orange-induced lung cancer felled him, she said. She bathed him in his final year, and he was bedridden for three months until his death in 1999.
His VA status allowed his widow to pursue government medical benefits as a dependent, including medication. Those are some of the benefits Singleton thought she was receiving since 2006, without realizing it was a VA benefit, not one from the Defense Department.
Naval Hospital Beaufort did not return a request for comment, and a spokesperson could not receive voice mails on their phone. The hospital told the Island Packet that it attempts to “generate accurate and timely billing for services.”
“Unfortunately, failure of the verification process does sometimes occur,” the hospital said. “When these errors are discovered, all corrective efforts are made.”
The hospital declined to comment on Singleton’s case to the Packet, citing a need for patient release authorization. It did not say why the error had been made.
Singleton asked Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) for help, and his office spoke with the Navy congressional liaison on her behalf, a spokesman said, but it is unclear whether a resolution is forthcoming.
In the meantime, the bills are piling up and Singleton would prefer to travel and dote on her grandson rather than tangle with bureaucratic errors. She now gets her medication through VA dependent benefits.
“It works fine,” she said. “I would have done the right thing and used this had I known.”
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