Don't let this story worry you too much. These people were unworthy of blue-dot-level medical care. You're much more worthy of care in the eyes of UCLA. You'll get at least purple-dot treatment. Unless, perhaps, your health problem itself is a red-dot problem. (In case you missed it: irony alert!)
SYLMAR>> Olive View-UCLA Medical Center
has agreed to pay $40,750 to settle a patient dumping case involving a
man who waited in the hospital’s emergency department for more than six
hours and never received care for his pain and acute appendicitis,
federal officials announced Thursday.
The settlement was made between Olive View and the Office of Inspector General
of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services based on a case
in 2011. Federal officials said the Sylmar facility violated the
Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act by “failing to provide an
individual with an appropriate medical screening examination within the
capability of the hospital’s emergency department in order to determine
whether he had an emergency medical condition.”
According to the complaint, a man complaining of abdominal pain
waited in Olive View’s emergency department for more than six hours
where he received no care. He left and received medical treatment at
another hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute appendicitis among
other medical issues and underwent an immediate laparoscopic
appendectomy.
Olive View has since made several corrections,
Olive View spokeswoman Azar Kattan said. Those include additional
physicians assigned to provide rapid medical screening to patients given
a triage score of at least 3. On the 1-5 scale, a triage score of 1 is
most urgent, Kattan said.
She also said the computer system was modified to provide real-time alerts to the nursing staff among other actions.
“These
corrective actions were accepted by the regulatory agencies involved at
the time of the original citation in 2011,” Kattan said in a written
statement. “We believe they have corrected the problems identified and
ensure the timely assessment and treatment of patients seeking care in
our emergency room.”
Showing posts with label hospitals caring for indigent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hospitals caring for indigent. Show all posts
Friday, June 20, 2014
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Trouble In Mitt Romney's Socialist Hospital Paradise
In 2010 Romney himself acknowledged the need for Obama's health care law (before he began pursuing the Republican presidential nomination):
"Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way."
Trouble In Mitt Romney's Socialist Hospital Paradise
10/27/2012
Arthur Delaney and Jamieson
Huff Post
In the early hours of May 1, D.C. bartender Mike Boone came to the aid of a young woman who was being mugged.
Boone had offered to walk her home from the bar, Trusty's on Capitol Hill, since the immediate neighborhood is not known for having the safest streets at night. A man jumped from behind some bushes and grabbed the woman's purse. Boone also grabbed it, and the two men started fighting.
"We were punching each other pretty hard," Boone recalled. It wasn't until blood gushed from his body and the woman screamed that the bartender realized what had really happened.
"He was punching me with a knife," Boone said.
Boone passed out on the sidewalk. He woke up the next day in a hospital bed, recovering from eight stab wounds and a collapsed lung.
Like nearly 50 million other Americans, Boone lacked health insurance. A pre-existing condition -- in his case, a broken back he suffered in 1993 -- prevented him from obtaining affordable coverage. President Barack Obama's health care law prohibits insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, but that reform doesn't go into effect for adults until 2014.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has vowed to repeal the health care law entirely if he's elected. In America, Romney has said, we don't let people die in the street simply because they lack health insurance: Hospitals are there to care for the uninsured.
"We don't have a setting across this country where if you don't have insurance, we just say to you, 'Tough luck, you're going to die when you have your heart attack,'" Romney said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch on Oct. 11. "No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it's paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital."
Indeed, the health care system did not let Boone bleed to death on the sidewalk. But it did bury him in life-altering debt. After four days in the hospital and two surgeries, the 39-year-old -- hailed as a hero on Capitol Hill and beyond for his actions -- is staring at $60,000 in medical bills so far. And they haven't stopped rolling in.
Well-wishers, moved by media reports of his story, have donated $17,000 to help Boone cover his expenses, and he's hoping a public fund for crime victims could defray as much as $25,000 more. But Boone, who said he expects to earn only about $15,000 this year, figures he'll still be looking at nearly $20,000 in debt, all for risking his life for a fellow human being.
His story is one that plays out with troubling regularity in the bar-and-restaurant business, where a high quotient of workers go without health coverage. Post-tragedy fundraisers are common in the industry. The events serve as vivid examples of the private sector's safety net in action.
These fundraisers can defray some of the costs of emergency care, as they have done for Boone, but often they don't provide nearly enough. Paying for health care isn't as efficient or just as Romney suggests. Instead, much of the cost is borne by health care providers and insurers and, ultimately, the insured. We all pay.
"At first, I was like, man, this is really great, this could take care of it," Boone said of the charity he has received. "And then the big bills started coming."
A FORM OF SOCIALISM
Douglas Zehner is the senior vice president and chief financial officer at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in northwest Washington, where Boone was treated. He said Medstar gave $22.1 million worth of care to uninsured or underinsured patients and forgave $85.1 million in debt last year. But that charity isn't free. The only way the hospital can recoup its losses, Zehner said, is by negotiating with private insurance providers for higher prices, a process known as "cost-shifting."
"I have to price my services with insurance carriers because that’s the only group I'm even in the room talking to about how much they're going to pay me for my services," Zehner said. "So the way the cost-shifting works is you basically back into how much [money] you need to run that service [for all patients] and apply it to the expected number of people that are coming in that have insurance to get that service."
The fewer people who have insurance, the greater the burden on those who do have coverage. In order to cover the costs of treating the uninsured, premiums go up. The American Hospital Association estimated that U.S. hospitals performed $39.3 billion worth of uncompensated care in 2010, the most recent year for which numbers are available. That's 5.8 percent of total expenses.
This is a problem that Obama's health care law seeks to address and one that Romney himself has acknowledged in the past, before he began pursuing the Republican presidential nomination.
"Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said in 2010.
In 2007, he used even starker language: "When [uninsured people] show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is."...
"Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way."
Trouble In Mitt Romney's Socialist Hospital Paradise
10/27/2012
Arthur Delaney and Jamieson
Huff Post
In the early hours of May 1, D.C. bartender Mike Boone came to the aid of a young woman who was being mugged.
Boone had offered to walk her home from the bar, Trusty's on Capitol Hill, since the immediate neighborhood is not known for having the safest streets at night. A man jumped from behind some bushes and grabbed the woman's purse. Boone also grabbed it, and the two men started fighting.
"We were punching each other pretty hard," Boone recalled. It wasn't until blood gushed from his body and the woman screamed that the bartender realized what had really happened.
"He was punching me with a knife," Boone said.
Boone passed out on the sidewalk. He woke up the next day in a hospital bed, recovering from eight stab wounds and a collapsed lung.
Like nearly 50 million other Americans, Boone lacked health insurance. A pre-existing condition -- in his case, a broken back he suffered in 1993 -- prevented him from obtaining affordable coverage. President Barack Obama's health care law prohibits insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, but that reform doesn't go into effect for adults until 2014.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has vowed to repeal the health care law entirely if he's elected. In America, Romney has said, we don't let people die in the street simply because they lack health insurance: Hospitals are there to care for the uninsured.
"We don't have a setting across this country where if you don't have insurance, we just say to you, 'Tough luck, you're going to die when you have your heart attack,'" Romney said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch on Oct. 11. "No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it's paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital."
Indeed, the health care system did not let Boone bleed to death on the sidewalk. But it did bury him in life-altering debt. After four days in the hospital and two surgeries, the 39-year-old -- hailed as a hero on Capitol Hill and beyond for his actions -- is staring at $60,000 in medical bills so far. And they haven't stopped rolling in.
Well-wishers, moved by media reports of his story, have donated $17,000 to help Boone cover his expenses, and he's hoping a public fund for crime victims could defray as much as $25,000 more. But Boone, who said he expects to earn only about $15,000 this year, figures he'll still be looking at nearly $20,000 in debt, all for risking his life for a fellow human being.
His story is one that plays out with troubling regularity in the bar-and-restaurant business, where a high quotient of workers go without health coverage. Post-tragedy fundraisers are common in the industry. The events serve as vivid examples of the private sector's safety net in action.
These fundraisers can defray some of the costs of emergency care, as they have done for Boone, but often they don't provide nearly enough. Paying for health care isn't as efficient or just as Romney suggests. Instead, much of the cost is borne by health care providers and insurers and, ultimately, the insured. We all pay.
"At first, I was like, man, this is really great, this could take care of it," Boone said of the charity he has received. "And then the big bills started coming."
A FORM OF SOCIALISM
Douglas Zehner is the senior vice president and chief financial officer at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in northwest Washington, where Boone was treated. He said Medstar gave $22.1 million worth of care to uninsured or underinsured patients and forgave $85.1 million in debt last year. But that charity isn't free. The only way the hospital can recoup its losses, Zehner said, is by negotiating with private insurance providers for higher prices, a process known as "cost-shifting."
"I have to price my services with insurance carriers because that’s the only group I'm even in the room talking to about how much they're going to pay me for my services," Zehner said. "So the way the cost-shifting works is you basically back into how much [money] you need to run that service [for all patients] and apply it to the expected number of people that are coming in that have insurance to get that service."
The fewer people who have insurance, the greater the burden on those who do have coverage. In order to cover the costs of treating the uninsured, premiums go up. The American Hospital Association estimated that U.S. hospitals performed $39.3 billion worth of uncompensated care in 2010, the most recent year for which numbers are available. That's 5.8 percent of total expenses.
This is a problem that Obama's health care law seeks to address and one that Romney himself has acknowledged in the past, before he began pursuing the Republican presidential nomination.
"Look, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way," he said in 2010.
In 2007, he used even starker language: "When [uninsured people] show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is."...
Saturday, December 10, 2011
New Study Finds California Pacific Medical Center (San Francisco) Profits Not Matched by Charity Care
CPMC (California Pacific Medical Center) spent about four times LESS on charity care than St. Francis Memorial Hospital, which is about one-third of CPMC's size.
California Hospital News Roundup for the Week of December 9, 2011
California Healthline
December 09, 2011
California Pacific Medical Center [San Francisco] spends significantly less on care for low-income residents than other private not-for-profit hospitals in San Francisco, according to a report by UC Hastings College of the Law, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
For example, the report found that CPMC spent about four times less on charity care than St. Francis Memorial Hospital, which is about one-third of CPMC's size.
CPMC and its St. Luke's campus had an average annual net income of about $149 million between 2006 and 2010, nearly 12 times the combined annual profit of the other facilities, according to the report.
CPMC spokesperson Kevin McCormack said that last year, the hospital provided more than $15.3 million in charity care -- nearly threefold what it spent in 2007.
According to McCormack, the report is biased because it was prepared at the request of community organizations that have criticized the hospital (Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/9).
New Study Finds CPMC Profits Not Matched by Charity Care
by Jonathan Nathan
Beyond Chron
Dec. 09‚ 2011
Members of the Community Economic Development Clinic of the University of Hastings College of the Law released a study on the profitability and charitable care efforts of San Francisco's nonprofit private hospitals on Thursday in a press conference, with representatives of various community organizations on hand to discuss the implications of the study and, specifically, the potential impacts of the proposed rebuild of Sutter Health's California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC).
The study detailed the financial capacity and performance of the major nonprofit hospitals in San Francisco, as well as their various levels of compliance with municipal guidelines on charitable care, based on a review of data gathered by the Department of Public Health, the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, the IRS, and publicly available documents.
The study concluded that CPMC, comprised of four campuses around San Francisco, has a significantly greater financial capacity than any of the other private nonprofit hospitals in the city, but spends a disproportionately lower amount on charitable care, Medi-Cal patient care, and Healthy San Francisco patient care. Medi-Cal and Healthy San Francisco are, respectively, the statewide and citywide programs for low- and middle-income consumers in the city. The St. Luke's campus, for example, is Sutter Health's most profitable hospital in California, and has accounted for over a quarter of Sutter's total profits over the last five years. St. Luke's had a net income of $743.9 million between 2006 and 2010 for an average annual profit of $149 million, roughly 12 times the average of all other area nonprofit hospitals combined. Yet the ratio of charitable care to net patient revenue at St. Luke's was lower than that at St. Francis, a hospital which had a net profit in the negatives over the past five years, and CPMC as a whole performed worse as a charitable institution than any other in the city, nearly five percentage points lower than the 6% guideline laid out by the Board of Supervisors.
Further, the study presents evidence that the chasm between CPMC's charitable performance and that of other area nonprofit hospitals would only worsen if CPMC's current rebuild plan were put into action, as the rebuild proposes cutting the number of beds at the St. Luke's campus, in the Mission, from over 200 beds to 80. As the St. Luke's campus is by far the best-performing of CPMC's hospital locations in terms of charitable care, the implications for CPMC's ability to fulfill its obligations to the community, as set forth by the Board of Supervisors, are dire. While CPMC spent nearly 4% of its revenue on charitable care, the other three campuses in the system spent less than 1%. With CPMC, the city's largest provider of Medi-Cal health care by far, currently slated to cut its capacity by more than two thirds, there is a clear threat to publicly funded health care for low- and middle-income consumers, and several of the assembled speakers at the press conference warned that the move would cause overcrowding at all of San Francisco's hospitals, particularly San Francisco General.
Emily Jie-Ming Lee, Lead Organizer for the Chinese Progressive Association, discussed the CPMC situation by framing it in terms of the Occupy movement, and called attention to the fact that health care is now the prime barrier to a middle-class lifestyle. She briefly spoke of one woman who had to remortgage her home to pay for cancer treatments, and eventually had to default and lost her home. Lee noted that City residents rely on public insurance in greater numbers than the national average, a trend which only increase as federal health care reform measures take hold in the coming years. Lee called on CPMC to increase its share of charitable care in the City, and to equalize the burden among its campuses. With St. Luke's seeing four times more charitable care cases than the other three campuses combined, “it does not speak well to equal access to care,” Lee said.
Paul Kumar, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, called out CPMC for double-charging San Francisco taxpayers, in the sense that the system reaps the benefits of municipal tax relief while forcing customers to pay more out-of-pocket for services. Kumar made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that CPMC's refusal “to do anything like its appropriate share of charity care” has the same effect on everyday taxpayer's pocketbooks as would an actual tax increase, due to the stress it places on City finances. Given that CPMC is part of one of the most profitable health care systems in the state, Kumar argued, “claims of financial incapacity are laughable. If other hospitals, making far less money than CPMC, are able to do their share of charity care, why is it so unsustainable for CPMC?”
The various speakers made it clear that they were not against CPMC's rebuild proposals in principle, but that they wanted to make sure that whatever steps were taken would keep workforce development, local communities, low-income consumers, affordable housing, and charitable care as priorities. Said Lee, “We want to see this project built and we want a good project.”
California Hospital News Roundup for the Week of December 9, 2011
California Healthline
December 09, 2011
California Pacific Medical Center [San Francisco] spends significantly less on care for low-income residents than other private not-for-profit hospitals in San Francisco, according to a report by UC Hastings College of the Law, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
For example, the report found that CPMC spent about four times less on charity care than St. Francis Memorial Hospital, which is about one-third of CPMC's size.
CPMC and its St. Luke's campus had an average annual net income of about $149 million between 2006 and 2010, nearly 12 times the combined annual profit of the other facilities, according to the report.
CPMC spokesperson Kevin McCormack said that last year, the hospital provided more than $15.3 million in charity care -- nearly threefold what it spent in 2007.
According to McCormack, the report is biased because it was prepared at the request of community organizations that have criticized the hospital (Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/9).
New Study Finds CPMC Profits Not Matched by Charity Care
by Jonathan Nathan
Beyond Chron
Dec. 09‚ 2011
Members of the Community Economic Development Clinic of the University of Hastings College of the Law released a study on the profitability and charitable care efforts of San Francisco's nonprofit private hospitals on Thursday in a press conference, with representatives of various community organizations on hand to discuss the implications of the study and, specifically, the potential impacts of the proposed rebuild of Sutter Health's California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC).
The study detailed the financial capacity and performance of the major nonprofit hospitals in San Francisco, as well as their various levels of compliance with municipal guidelines on charitable care, based on a review of data gathered by the Department of Public Health, the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, the IRS, and publicly available documents.
The study concluded that CPMC, comprised of four campuses around San Francisco, has a significantly greater financial capacity than any of the other private nonprofit hospitals in the city, but spends a disproportionately lower amount on charitable care, Medi-Cal patient care, and Healthy San Francisco patient care. Medi-Cal and Healthy San Francisco are, respectively, the statewide and citywide programs for low- and middle-income consumers in the city. The St. Luke's campus, for example, is Sutter Health's most profitable hospital in California, and has accounted for over a quarter of Sutter's total profits over the last five years. St. Luke's had a net income of $743.9 million between 2006 and 2010 for an average annual profit of $149 million, roughly 12 times the average of all other area nonprofit hospitals combined. Yet the ratio of charitable care to net patient revenue at St. Luke's was lower than that at St. Francis, a hospital which had a net profit in the negatives over the past five years, and CPMC as a whole performed worse as a charitable institution than any other in the city, nearly five percentage points lower than the 6% guideline laid out by the Board of Supervisors.
Further, the study presents evidence that the chasm between CPMC's charitable performance and that of other area nonprofit hospitals would only worsen if CPMC's current rebuild plan were put into action, as the rebuild proposes cutting the number of beds at the St. Luke's campus, in the Mission, from over 200 beds to 80. As the St. Luke's campus is by far the best-performing of CPMC's hospital locations in terms of charitable care, the implications for CPMC's ability to fulfill its obligations to the community, as set forth by the Board of Supervisors, are dire. While CPMC spent nearly 4% of its revenue on charitable care, the other three campuses in the system spent less than 1%. With CPMC, the city's largest provider of Medi-Cal health care by far, currently slated to cut its capacity by more than two thirds, there is a clear threat to publicly funded health care for low- and middle-income consumers, and several of the assembled speakers at the press conference warned that the move would cause overcrowding at all of San Francisco's hospitals, particularly San Francisco General.
Emily Jie-Ming Lee, Lead Organizer for the Chinese Progressive Association, discussed the CPMC situation by framing it in terms of the Occupy movement, and called attention to the fact that health care is now the prime barrier to a middle-class lifestyle. She briefly spoke of one woman who had to remortgage her home to pay for cancer treatments, and eventually had to default and lost her home. Lee noted that City residents rely on public insurance in greater numbers than the national average, a trend which only increase as federal health care reform measures take hold in the coming years. Lee called on CPMC to increase its share of charitable care in the City, and to equalize the burden among its campuses. With St. Luke's seeing four times more charitable care cases than the other three campuses combined, “it does not speak well to equal access to care,” Lee said.
Paul Kumar, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, called out CPMC for double-charging San Francisco taxpayers, in the sense that the system reaps the benefits of municipal tax relief while forcing customers to pay more out-of-pocket for services. Kumar made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that CPMC's refusal “to do anything like its appropriate share of charity care” has the same effect on everyday taxpayer's pocketbooks as would an actual tax increase, due to the stress it places on City finances. Given that CPMC is part of one of the most profitable health care systems in the state, Kumar argued, “claims of financial incapacity are laughable. If other hospitals, making far less money than CPMC, are able to do their share of charity care, why is it so unsustainable for CPMC?”
The various speakers made it clear that they were not against CPMC's rebuild proposals in principle, but that they wanted to make sure that whatever steps were taken would keep workforce development, local communities, low-income consumers, affordable housing, and charitable care as priorities. Said Lee, “We want to see this project built and we want a good project.”
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