AURORA — The ring sparkled: 18-karat white gold, double-banded, with a 1.5-carat diamond at its center.

It was the ring that Cathy Woods-Sullivan’s late husband had given to her on their wedding day, a family heirloom. Other than their two teenage daughters, it was the most precious thing she had left.

She handed it forward to the pawnbroker feeling sick to her stomach.

He looked at her, then at the ring, then back up at her.

“I’m going to hold onto it for a little while,” he said.

But Woods-Sullivan knew she wouldn’t be back.

She needed the money to pay off a debt to UCHealth, Colorado’s largest hospital system, one that collects more than $6 billion a year in revenue from patient care. 

“We improve lives,” UCHealth touts in its mission statement.

But this same system sues thousands of its patients like Woods-Sullivan every year, according to a 9News/Colorado Sun investigation done in partnership with the Colorado News Collaborative and KFF Health News. 

What’s more, many of these lawsuits are shielded from public scrutiny through a system in which collection companies working with UCHealth file lawsuits in their own names. Taken together, UCHealth and these companies filed 15,710 lawsuits from 2019 through 2023, UCHealth revealed in response to questions from 9News and the Colorado Sun. That is an average of 3,142 lawsuits per year, or more than eight per day.

In the last four years, virtually none of the lawsuits have been filed in UCHealth’s name.

“They are essentially deliberately using those third-party collection agencies to obscure the fact that they are the ones suing the patients,” said Adam Fox, the deputy director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, a consumer-advocacy group that helps patients in disputes over medical bills. “It makes it really hard for the patient to untangle.”