The University of Maryland Medical System has agreed to mail $2,251,781.52, or about $2.25 million, in restitution to patients who paid outpatient facility fees the hospital system did not adequately disclose, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown’s Consumer Protection Division announced on September 25. The fees at issue were charged before July 1, 2021, the date Maryland’s Facility Fee Right-to-Know Act took effect, and eligible patients do not have to file a claim: UMMS is expected to mail refund checks directly over the next six months.
What the six-month window leaves open: UMMS’s settlement sets no way to track where a check falls in that window, which The Settlement & Refund Recovery System’s claim log and payment tracker are built for. Track a six-month refund check with a payment log →
What The Settlement Actually Restitutes
The executed settlement agreement, hosted on the Attorney General’s own site, resolves allegations that UMMS charged patients outpatient facility fees without disclosing them clearly enough before the state’s disclosure law existed. UMMS denied wrongdoing but agreed to the $2,251,781.52 restitution figure and to the refund mechanism the Consumer Protection Division announced. The office’s release describes the money as going “to consumers who paid out-of-pocket for facility fees,” language that distinguishes this settlement from a fine paid to the state: every eligible dollar is designated to reach a patient, not the treasury. Facility fees are billed separately from a doctor’s own charge when a clinic or outpatient office is owned by a hospital rather than operating independently, and they tend to recur for the kind of routine outpatient care, imaging, follow-up visits, minor procedures, that an older patient managing an ongoing condition returns for repeatedly rather than encountering once.
The Test That Decides Who Gets A Check
Not every patient who ever paid a UMMS facility fee qualifies. The restitution applies specifically “to instances where the same clinic services were also available at non-hospital facilities owned or operated by an UMMS affiliate where no facility fees would have been assessed,” according to the executed settlement agreement. In practice, that means the trigger is not the fee itself but a comparison: whether a patient could have received the identical outpatient service at a UMMS-affiliated site that does not charge the hospital-based fee, and was instead routed to, or treated at, a facility that did.
No Claim Form, But A Six-Month Wait
UMMS is not asking affected patients to apply. Eligible patients, per the settlement agreement, “are expected to receive refund checks directly from UMMS over the next six months,” meaning the hospital system, not a third-party claims administrator, is identifying accounts and mailing payments on its own timeline rather than on a fixed date. That is a materially different process than a class-action claim form with a single deadline, and it puts the burden of tracking a payment’s status on the patient rather than on a portal or hotline built for the purpose, since the settlement itself sets a window rather than a specific mailing date for any individual check.
A Second Maryland Hospital System Faced The Same Claim
This is not the Consumer Protection Division’s first facility-fee settlement this year. In March 2026, the same office announced a $1,985,198.90 restitution settlement with LifeBridge Health over the identical conduct: outpatient facility fees charged before July 1, 2021, at sites where the same service was also available fee-free through a LifeBridge affiliate, refunded through checks mailed “over the course of the next six months.” The nearly identical mechanism and cutoff date across two separate hospital systems, six months apart, points to a standing enforcement effort by the Attorney General’s office against undisclosed facility fees predating the 2021 disclosure law, rather than a one-off dispute specific to UMMS. Combined, the two settlements put more than $4.2 million into restitution checks for Maryland patients over roughly six months, both routed through the same Consumer Protection Division and both structured as automatic mailings rather than claim programs.
Why The Pre-2021 Cutoff Still Matters Now
Both settlements confine restitution to fees charged before Maryland’s Facility Fee Right-to-Know Act took effect on July 1, 2021, according to the Maryland General Assembly’s own record of the bill, which requires hospitals to post and disclose these charges going forward. That cutoff means a patient billed a facility fee after mid-2021 falls outside either settlement’s restitution pool, even if the fee itself felt just as unexpected, because the law’s disclosure requirement is presumed to have applied by then. For a UMMS patient trying to figure out whether an old bill might be covered, the relevant question is not how large the fee was but whether the visit happened before that July 2021 date and whether a fee-free alternative existed at a UMMS-affiliated site at the time. The 2021 law itself does not appear in either settlement as something patients need to invoke; it functions only as the line the Attorney General’s office draws between conduct it is treating as a disclosure failure and conduct it is not, which is why both restitution pools stop at the same date rather than extending into more recent billing.
What Two Settlements In One Year Signal Statewide
UMMS and LifeBridge are two of Maryland’s larger hospital networks, and both drew restitution figures in the same range from the same enforcement office within six months of each other over the same category of billing. That pattern suggests the Consumer Protection Division is working through outpatient facility-fee disclosure as a sector-wide question rather than a single hospital’s isolated practice, which raises the practical odds that a patient who used any large Maryland hospital system’s outpatient clinics before July 2021 has reason to watch their mail rather than assume the issue was confined to one provider.
The Eligibility Test Behind Every UMMS Refund Check
Maryland’s settlement ties restitution to a specific comparison test, not simply to having paid a facility fee before July 2021, and neither UMMS’s mailing nor the Attorney General’s announcement walks a patient through confirming that test on their own. A restitution program built around an internal hospital-billing comparison, rather than a public claim form, is also an easy shape for a scam message to imitate once word of a real settlement spreads.
The Settlement & Refund Recovery System includes the source vault of 12 places money can sit unclaimed and the four-date rule for reading any settlement notice, whether it arrives from an agency or a hospital, before assuming it applies.
Read the four-date rule for any settlement notice in The Settlement & Refund Recovery System.
This article was produced with AI assistance and checked against the primary sources linked above.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
