Hospitals in Non Profit Areas Dependent on Medicare Did a Better Job With Cost, but Look to be the Hardest Hit With Reductions

Well so much for doing a good job it appears as the efforts don’t appear to have any impact. Financial pressures continue and myself I really question asking hospitals for concessions, it’s not the hospitals who have the big funds and reserve funds, it’s the insurance companies and secondary the drug companies that have stockpiles of money. Hospitals and patients are only the vehicles and consumers that need both products for healthcare, the expensive drugs are prescribed, and secondary the insurance companies or even Medicare in some instances either pay or deny the claims.

How can we win on this one? Without drugs there’s no treatment and without payments hospitals can’t keep the doors open, so the real losers here are both the hospitals and patients. It doesn’t make sense that we keep going to the dry well to look for money when there are others that are over flowing. Sure there have been some concessions from the pharmaceutical business and health insurance companies but it is not enough and appear to be more of a “token” of good faith or more of a statement issues to satisfy lobbying concerns.

Again, if our Congress had a better understanding of Health IT and algorithms that calculate all of this, perhaps we would be as far under water as we are today, and thinking has to come forward to way business operates today and not like the days of the 70s. I would much rather see a penny or two sales tax enacted to ensure everyone is taken care of as needed instead of all this craziness we keep hearing about as all is going nowhere in hurry. BD

The commission found that nonprofit hospitals facing the least financial pressure, those with high non-Medicare profits, spent more per unit of service. Nonprofit hospitals facing the most financial pressure, those with little income outside Medicare, controlled their costs better.

Worried that financial pressures might lead to lower quality of care, the Medicare commission also examined how hospitals that did a good job of controlling costs compared on measures like mortality rates and readmissions. These hospitals typically had higher quality and lower costs, and will likely be the ones hit hardest by across-the board reductions.

The recent deal between Mr. Obama and the hospital industry can hardly be called “health reform.” What is clear, however, is that hospital market power, left unchecked, will pose a formidable obstacle to the president’s promise to make health care more affordable.

Op-Ed Contributor - Cut Medicare With a Scalpel - NYTimes.com