Call Kurtis Investigates: As Many as 1 in 50 Death Certificates May Have Mistakes

CITRUS HEIGHTS (CBS13) — Widow Donna Fritts says her husband of 37 years lived a day longer than stated on his death certificate. Now Medicare has sent her letters saying it won't cover his medical care from his dying day.

Grieving for Stephen is hard enough.

"Oh he was a wonderful man," Donna said. "Everybody loved Stephen. Everyone."

Weeks after his death, she realized Sutter Memorial Hospital made a mistake marking his death on his death certificate as July 14th, instead of July 15th.

"How could you do this? How could you put the wrong date there?"

The hospital clerical mistake took seven weeks to fix, which meant she had to wait seven weeks to apply for his pensions. Then two letters from Medicare showed up saying they wouldn't cover his medical bills from his dying day.

"This service occurred after the patient's date of death and cannot be allowed," the letter stated. "Therefore, no payment can be made."

We've learned coroners, funeral directors, doctors and hospitals all can submit electronic death certificates through the web based Electronic Death Registration System. We wanted to know how common are these types of mistakes. The State Department of Public Health tells CBS13 it received 5,622 requests to amend death certificates last year alone for everything from misspellings, to wrong information to information that was not known at the time of death.

CBS13 learned 248,118 people died in California in 2013. Granted not all of the 5,622 requests for amendments are for deaths from the same year, but if you crunch those figures, as many as one in fifty death certificates need to be changed.

We reached out to Sutter Health about the mistake on Stephen's death certificate. A spokesperson said, "We're very sorry for the added stress it may have caused Mrs. Frits at her time of grief. The hospital has handled the issue with Medicare and the bills will be paid."

After we started looking into it, Sutter Health changed its policy to require two people to check the date on death certificates before they're submitted.

Donna wants this behind her so she can focus on grieving for Stephen.

"I know people make mistakes, but that's a pretty big one."