Breaking news: Dead patients don't pay

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The New World Trade Center is over-budget and won't be finished until who knows when.

Did you see the inadvertently hilarious Page 1 quote in The Record today from Anthony Orlando, CFO at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center?


Englewood and other hospitals apparently are stiffed so much they are requiring patients to pay upfront, even in the emergency room.


"When you go to Best Buy, do you walk out without paying," Orlando asks rhetorically -- as if an operation or other medical procedure is as common as buying a flat-screen TV.


"The only chance to collect a debt, direct and face to face, is when they're [patients] here," he goes on. "You may never see them again."


Especially if they die on the operating table. In other words, dead patients don't pay, so the hospital tries to get its money while they are alive and kicking.


Editor's giant error


Thanks to interim Editor Douglas Clancy, overblown coverage of the Giants on A-1 doesn't leave much room for general-interest news besides the hospital story.


A second front-page report says North Jersey residents continue to take a bath from the Port Authority's construction of the New World Trade Center. 


It's bad enough we're all paying higher tolls, but now readers learn about the outrageous compensation being paid to members of the private 9/11 Memorial foundation.


In the Local section, a story on the miraculous recovery of an Englewood woman whose heart stopped in church on Jan. 15 doesn't say whether her relatives were asked for a credit-card imprint when she arrived at the Englewood Hospital emergency room (L-3).