They were there to dispute a Miami doctor’s medical bill. Then someone called the cops.
.png "A Coral Gables Police cruiser parks outside the office of Dr. Mark Shaya after the clinic called the police on a former patient’s husband during court-ordered mediation over a billing dispute. (Photo filed in circuit court by attorney Jeffrey Davis)")
The relationship between Courtney and Erik Bandy and their Coral Gables neurosurgeon had already soured, with two lawsuits and a countersuit over medical billing, when the couple arrived at the Neurological Institute of Florida on Dec. 16 at the doctor’s request to attend a legal mediation hearing.
Courtney Bandy was there to try to reach an agreement on her suit against neurosurgeon Mark Shaya. She’d accused him of falsely telling her his services would be covered under her health insurance plan, only to bill her later for $90,000 — with about $65,000 in out-of-pocket expenses. Shaya had countersued her, saying she had signed documents agreeing to pay for anything not covered by insurance.
She brought her husband with her to the mediation — and things escalated.
Erik Bandy had driven her to the meeting from West Palm Beach because she has difficulty driving long distances, according to court records.. But Shaya objected to the husband being there, or even in the waiting room., court records said — perhaps because Shaya had sued Erik Bandy three days earlier for non-payment of $110,000 for a separate surgery.
That’s when the doctor — or someone else at his direction — called the police to arrest or evict Erik Bandy, his former patient, according to a mediator’s report on the hearing. By the time Jeff Davis, the couple’s attorney, decided to end the mediation and got up to leave with the couple, the police had already arrived, according to court filings. The couple and their attorney left the premises, and no arrests were made.
Shaya told a Miami-Dade judge during a hearing three days later that his staff was concerned about Erik Bandy disparaging him in front of other patients and that Bandy had a bag with him and was “loitering around.”
“We didn’t know what was in the bag,” Shaya said. “He made my whole office very uncomfortable. We didn’t know ... what was going through his head.”
The suits between the couple and the doctor are still in court, part of a large volume of legal cases that have been swirling around medical billing in South Florida. Medical bills are one of the most common reasons Americans go into debt, and the problem isn’t limited to people without health insurance.
More than 60% of people with medical bill problems who responded to a major 2016 Kaiser Health Foundation/New York Times survey said the person who incurred the bills was covered by health insurance at the time. Of those, about 32% said they struggled to pay because they received care from an out-of-network provider their insurance wouldn’t pay for. And about 70% who reported that issue said they were not aware their provider wasn’t covered by their plan when they received the care.
In Bandy’s case, the bills made it all the way to court. Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge David Miller called Shaya’s reaction “completely unreasonable,” adding that he had never heard of such an escalation in 40 years of overseeing such cases.
“And now we’re talking, you know, about bags,” Judge Miller said. “ ...I bet a lot of your patients come in with purses or man bags or whatever.”
Shaya responded: “We trust our patients ... This is a party that cannot be trusted.”
Davis, the attorney for the Bandys, said during the court hearing that Erik had a laptop in his bag because he works for Siemens as a medical device representative and wanted to get work done while in the waiting room.
Shaya wouldn’t comment on the case when contacted by the Herald, citing a “confidentiality agreement.” His attorney later filed an emergency motion seeking to restrict former patients — the Bandys — and their attorney from communicating with the Miami Herald.
The dispute with the Bandys wasn’t the first time Shaya had been taken to court. In 2016, the University of Miami filed a lawsuit that later identified Shaya as allegedly creating false profiles on vitals.com, a website where people can post ratings and reviews of doctors online.
The university accused Shaya of leaving negative reviews about UM physicians, but Shaya responded that UM filed the lawsuit as retaliation against him out of professional envy and a dispute over his leasing of office space at the hospital formerly known as Cedars Medical Center, where he practiced before UM purchased the building, according to court records.
In February 2019, Shaya and UM reached an unspecified settlement in the case, nearly three years after it was first filed.
Courtney Bandy told the Herald she sought treatment from Shaya in January 2018 when she was suffering from lingering injuries caused by an April 2016 car crash in Broward County. In a complaint filed in June last year, Bandy said Shaya “unfairly, deceptively and unreasonably billed $93,350” after first advising her he was in-network — meaning, she would be covered — with Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
But the doctor was not part of that network, the complaint said. Only $24,200 of the treatment was covered as “out of network benefits,” according to the complaint.
After Bandy filed suit in June 2019, Shaya countersued a month later, citing an agreement Bandy had signed before he performed fusion surgery to stop a cervical disc from pushing on her spinal cord that stated, in part, “I understand that I am financially responsible for all charges, whether or not paid by said insurance.”
Shaya said in the countersuit that Bandy also signed a letter of protection that allows him to be paid out of the proceeds from a personal injury settlement related to Bandy’s car accident. Bandy’s attorneys said that she received a $100,000 settlement, but the entire amount is being held in a trust until the dispute with Shaya is resolved.
Erik Bandy told the Herald he was in the waiting room as his wife recovered from surgery in early 2018 when he first discussed with Shaya his own lingering back pain that he attributed to his time in the service as an army combat medic. Bandy said he got an MRI and later had his spine fused by Shaya after the doctor diagnosed him severe stenosis, or the narrowing of the spaces within the spine, in February 2018.
Three months later, when he and his wife returned to Shaya’s office for a double appointment, Erik Bandy said, they received invoices on their way out the door.
Shaya disputes that version of events, claiming in his own lawsuits against the couple that both Erik and Courtney Bandy were immediately provided with invoices following their surgeries and that neither contested them until later.
Erik Bandy said that because the bills were so high, both he and his wife decided not to return for any additional post-operative visits.
“Believe me, when you have surgery, you have questions for your doctors,” Bandy said. “I still didn’t know how much I could lift ... but I wasn’t going to call them.”
This story was originally published January 30, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
