“They have the highest healthcare costs in the Nation, and their hospitals are still losing money.”
It might simply be that there are a lot of hospitals in Massachusetts competing for the same patients:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospitals_in_Massachusetts
Maybe some SHOULD fail so the others can thrive?
It’s not so much that they are competing for the same patients as it is that there aren’t enough doctors to utilize them fully.
Not necessarily.
My wife works in Hospital Administration at one of the MA Hospitals. Here is what she is telling me:
The number of “elective” surgeries is way down because people cannot afford them.
The number of people coming to the ER for non emergency care is dropping significantly due to higher co-pays, which folks are choosing not to pay.
Neither of those are bad, if you are a hospital that can charge a lot for your care. However, if you are a hospital that relies on state insurance or medicare for your payments, you are screwed. This is because you cannot charge enough to your insured customers to cover the loss on your uninsured customers.
And....get ready for it....the unions behind the nurses do not care one lick for patient satisfaction or quality measures. If you ask them to do ANYTHING outside of the contract, they will simply ignore it or demand concessions.
And, if the hospital can charge higher rates, the medicare and state insurance pays it. For example, a traditional, non complicated birth is charged almost 40% more at the hospital down the road...and the state pays it. But the quality measures for the “poor people” hospitals are better and charge less.
In the end, if the state is going to run healthcare, they need to standardize the reimbursement for the same procedures at hospitals in the same area. But they don’t.
If you are going to go all socialized, then do not go half assed. If you are going to expect one hospital in a community to support ALL of the poor people, then you need to support the hospital.
The problem is that you cannot pretend you are not taking over, when your reimbursements are driving the system to exactly that.