and the appointment of a third-party advisor to its board to remedy the deficiencies found in the review. Hatch then launched a probe of Fairview Health Systems, another hospital system, finding that it aggressively collected debts from patients too poor to pay their bills and did not offer charity care, in violation of its mission as a nonprofit hospital. Hatch obtained a first-in-the-country settlement with Fairview in which it was required to stop using aggressive debt collection tactics, to expand its charity care for poor patients, to give discounts to middle-income families, and to give a third-party monitor appointed by Hatch broad authority to oversee the company's collection practices. Another oft-cited accomplishment of Hatch's was the 2005 agreement he reached with every hospital in Minnesota over their billing and collection practices. Under the agreement, the hospitals agreed to charged uninsured patients with household incomes less than $125,000, the same discounted prices their largest insurance company got. Before the agreement, hospitals charged uninsured patients up to four times more than they charged insurance companies. The hospitals also agreed to change their debt-collection practices to offer more charity care and give patients greater rights to negotiate payment terms. In a May 9, 2005 editorial, the Star Tribune wrote, "It is good to see Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch adopting the uninsured, the orphans of the health care system, and getting them a better deal." In 2005 and 2006, Hatch conducted a compliance review of Blue Cross, the state's largest health insurer, which found that it had amassed more than $1 billion in financial reserves while raising premiums and shifting costs to consumers. Hatch said at the time, "The obligation of Blue Cross is to provide affordable health care. Their statutory purpose is not to become the wealthiest nonprofit." Hatch was active in protecting vulnerable patients in care facilities from abuse. In March 2000 he filed a lawsuit against Alterra, a Wisconsin-based assisted living facility, for misrepresenting that it was qualified to take care of memory-impaired patients. The suit was featured in a Time magazine article about abuses at assisted-living facilities. Alterra charged patients up to $4,000 per month, but family members reported patients with Alzheimer's lying in their own feces and urine-soaked garments for hours, and local police frequently discovered dementia patients wandering the streets in the cold. Hatch noted at the time that assisted-living facilities were "essentially unregulated nursing homes," and