America’s Most Powerful Medical-Debt Collector
Updated at 3:00 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.
SAN MARCOS, Texas—In the autumn of 2012, Ricardo Gonzalez Jurado was 25 feet off the ground, balancing on metal scaffolding as he sawed a stack of wood. Gonzalez Jurado owns a Central Texas yoga retreat—an oasis deep in the woods where he’s built a cluster of small houses for customers seeking a few days of bodily and spiritual cleansing. That day, he was precariously constructing a large, hollow pyramid—intended as a meditation room—out of the mountain cedar that grows all over his land.
Suddenly, the saw snagged on Gonzalez Jurado’s clothing. He jumped back instinctively and stepped off the metal platform. Plummeting toward the pyramid’s wood floor, he tucked his knees to his chin, so that his heels took the brunt of the impact. There was a loud crack, then searing pain radiating up his left foot. He dragged himself out of the pyramid and called an ambulance.
He asked to be taken to a nearby hospital in San Marcos. But because of the height from which he fell, he told us, the paramedics instead took him to the Brooke Army Medical Center, or BAMC, a trauma center about 50 miles away that was better equipped to handle his injuries. Located on Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, BAMC is the flagship of the military health system—a network of that are meant for soldiers, but that also treat civilians to give military doctors experience
