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Show PARADES SPECIALC Intelligence Keport Because of volume of mail received. Parade regrets it cannot answer queries. .... Byi Llovd Shearer 1981 .... And yet, his relatives, lawyers and the government will divide his estate in what is an obvious miscarriage of justice spawned by his failure to leave a last will and testament. Heir Not Apparent makes an enthralling read. Nearly All Are Wrong I n I I T I Jl LJ ospital bills in the U.S. are a mess . Almost al of the bills recently audited 98.1, to be exact revealed sizable errors. Equifax Services Inc. of Atlanta, which audits hospital bills for virtually every major health insurance company in the nation, conducted a survey from November 1983 to March 1984. The firm examined 3850 bills from 41 states. These bills averaged S25.392. After they were studied and resubmitted, each was reduced by an average of S 254 , or 4 9 . Does this mean that hospitals consistently cheat? No. It simply means that individual charges are so numerous and emanate from so many different hospital sources that errors of commission and omission are virtually inevitable. W.C. Sherer, who manages life and health claims for Equifax, attributes most billing mistakes to human error. Lab tests and he explains, are often ordered and later canceled, but the charge slips already have been submitted. Data entry errors are also on the increase. Press the wrong key, and a S50 charge goes in the computer as a $500 charge. The most common billing errors involve pharmacy charges for drugs. These err on the side of overcharging. On some hospital bills, the number of pills reportedly dispensed for a particular patient was so high that, if accurate, the patient who took them would be dead or seriously overdosed. Most patients don't know how to read hospital bills. They are 1 . s, lengthy, detailed and complicated. And since the insurance company pays them, the consumer is generally satisfied. Equifax reports that 90 of the bills it audited in 1982. in 1981 were wrong, 93 in its latest incorrect bills Of the survey. 96.9 contained charges that could not be substantiated as services actually rendered. New Hughes' only wives were Ella Rice (I) and Jean Peters, says Suzanne Finstad(r) The Fight for the Howard Hughes Estate f theres anything that brings out the worst in people, it must be money. Eight Aprils ago, when Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, died at age 70 and the news leaked out that he had left neither a will nor a widow, some 300 persons laid claims to his fortune. To Suzanne Finstad, a young clerk in the Houston law firm of Butler & B inion , fell the task of helping to sort out the authentic Hughes relatives from the crooks and crackpots. After six years on that assignment, Finstad an attractive, blue-eye- d blonde, now 28 and herself a lawyer has written Heir Not Apparent, an intriguing book about her painstaking search for the rightful Hughes heirs. It is a fascinating, detailed work sprinkled with big Hollywood names Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner. Ginger Rogers as well as the names of the odd characters hungry for a bite of the $1.5 billion that the legendary recluse left behind. Finstad writes, for example, about Alyce Hovsepian Hughes, a strawberry blonde in her late 50s who maintained that she was Hughes legal widow. Her story was that they had been married in June 1946. A few months later, she said, Hughes visited her at the Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital, where she was a patient, and there raped her in front of a man called Sam the Actor or Sam the Jew. She couldn't remember which. Another character who claimed to have married the billionaire was Alma Hughes. According to small, d Alma, she had given birth out of wedlock to Hughes daughter Margie, whom he refused gray-haire- to acknowledge because she had blue eyes. Blessed with a fertile imagination, Alma declared that, while in a Dallas hospital undergoing hemorrhoid surgery, she had been artificially inseminated with Hughes' sperm and had given birth at age 64. Despite the claim of actress Terry Moore that she too was once Mrs. Howard Hughes, Finstad's meticulous research reveals that Hughes was married only twice: to Ella Rice in 1925, when he was 19 and she 21 ; and to actress Jean Peters on Jan. 12, 1957, when they were wed in Tonopah , Nev. , under the names G A . Johnson and Marian Evans. Hughes' first marriage lasted four years; his second, 14. Neither of his asked for or received a portion of his estate. Terry Moores claims were settled for $390,000, although she has never been recognized by any court or any of Hughes' relatives as his legal wife. She was paid off, one lawyer confided, "so that we could get rid of her nuisance suits. The largest share of the Hughes estate, 71.5, went to his maternal kindred. (At the time of his death, this included an aunt, Annette Gano Lummis, who since has died; 12 first cousins; and four first cousins Of the remainder, 19 went to three granddaughters of his paternal uncle, the writer Rupert Hughes, and 9.5 went to Rupert's two stepchildren. Ironically, Howard Hughes loathed his fathers relatives, particularly Rupert Hughes. He had little love for any of his relatives, none for lawyers and, as Finstad writes, he held the . U.S.-lsra- el Pact rrnm overseas comes word I that the U.S. and Israel will I 23 soon announce (if they I I haven't already) a bilateral LJ defense pact in w hich , under certain circumstances, the U.S. will fight side by side with Israeli forces. Reportedly the pact calls for Israel to act as an aircraft carrier of sorts in the Middle East should the U.S. require a forward base for its troops. To avoid acrimony in its relations with the Arab world, the U.S. in the past has avoided a signed, open military commitment to Israel. Hence, The Jerusalem Post reports that the pending agreement is being described as a watershed in n relations and the agreement itself unlike anything reached before.' Israeli-America- Olympic Bulletin f they all show, the 8250 journalists and media technicians scheduled to cover the Olympic Games in two weeks will outnumber the 7800 athletes expected to participate. ABC-Twhich bought the video rights to the Games for $225 million, will field a team of at least 2500 media persons. once-remove- government in highest contempt. Kathleen Sullivan of Olympic TV team PAGE 18 JULY 15, 1984 PARADE MAGAZINE |