POLITICS - Carlini's Comments

MICHAEL REESE HOSPITAL: ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

Filed Wednesday, June 11. 2008

As another Chicago-area hospital calls it quits, what are the remaining ones doing to keep a solid health care network in the Chicago metropolitan area? What’s happening to major area hospitals as they throw in the towel and scalpel and call it quits due to negative revenues?

The latest to close in Chicago is Michael Reese Hospital due to longstanding financial problems. Some say it’s also because it’s the perfect site for the proposed $1.1 billion Olympic village. Though nothing has been finalized, there’s a lot of talk about what to do with the 37-acre campus south of the McCormick Place complex.

Regardless of all the reasons behind its closure as well as its future development potential, the bottom line is that closing Michael Reese leaves a gap of coverage that may be critical if the surrounding hospitals can’t pick up the slack. An Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board hearing will make the decision on closing it in 2008. Some have encouraged people to contact them with pros, cons or indifferent perspectives.

Some say 2008 is going to be a banner year for urban shootings. Will the closure of a major hospital like Michael Reese affect the emergency and trauma care within the city? Will more lives be lost due to ambulances needing to go further to get to an emergency room? As is predicted on this blog: “It’s going to be a long, hot summer.”

National Problem

How many hospitals across the country are close to closing due to the non-payment of bills and the failure to collect for services rendered? There are more than just the two in the Chicago area. It’s a national issue. This is from a daily health care newsletter for executives:

A frightening percentage of hospitals in the Los Angeles metro area are fighting for their lives. According to a new analysis, almost two-dozen hospitals in the area are in the red and could face bankruptcy or closure.
These hospitals represent about 15 percent of the beds in the metro [area], so if any meaningful number of them were to go offline, the stress to the region’s already-overburdened health system could be immense.

Since 2000, 15 hospitals have closed in Los Angeles County. Trying to find a specialist in an emergency room situation is also becoming very difficult. This is from a Los Angeles Times article:

“Calling 911 gets you a waiting room,” said [Mark] Langdorf (the emergency department director at the University of California, Irvine medical center in Orange County, Calif.). “It doesn’t get you an emergency [doctor] and it certainly doesn’t get you a right to a medical specialist.”
The most obvious reason for the flight of specialists from emergency rooms is the surge of patients who have no medical insurance or who use Medi-Cal, which pays some of the lowest rates in the country.
It has become virtually impossible for these patients to find specialists in private practice to treat them, so they turn as a last resort to the emergency room, which under federal law must treat them regardless of their ability to pay.

According to a 2006 survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians, 73 percent of emergency departments in the United States “had inadequate on-call coverage by specialist physicians”. Many people going to an emergency room should be going to a local clinic or a primary care center. In other words, emergency rooms are jammed with non-emergency customers.

Nothing is Free

Many people think going to the emergency room is one way to get free treatment because they can’t pay for doctors and medicine. A recent New York Times article points out:

Roughly 14 percent of the nation’s uninsured live in California. One in three visits to a Los Angeles emergency room are made by someone without insurance. Many of those patients have conditions that have gone untreated for months and need to be admitted, [which further strains] hospital resources.

Do we have too many citizens without health care or do we have too many illegals walking into emergency rooms? This question is not xenophobic. It is politically accurate. We need to assess the situation and correct the problems. The failure to focus on the root causes of health care system decline only worsens the situation for everyone.

Closure of health care facilities is happening all over. Aside from California – where hospitals have closed due to negative revenues and a deluge of uninsured patients – Florida also has hospitals with major financial problems.

Carol Plato – director of corporate business services at Mark Memorial Medical Center – points out two cases of illegals racking up more than $1.5 million a piece in hospital care without picking up any of the tab. She also points out that the Florida Health Association says $100 million was spent in 2007 alone to treat illegal patients. That is only one state.

Hospital officials in Florida have complained that federal authorities do nothing when notified about illegals. This problem needs to be addressed immediately at the federal level.

Can Telemedicine Help?

Could a toll-free phone number help? How many non-emergency cases could be solved by calling a toll-free phone number or an Internet-based application? How much money could be saved if a diagnosis for common ailments could be done and a prescription could be sent online to a local drugstore for pick up?

If this could cut crowds at emergency rooms, the level of health services could automatically increase for those seeking emergency care. Both presidential candidates as well as Congress have to address this issue directly and stop the financial bleeding and degradation within the health care system.

How much do you pay for your health care? Get ready for another increase to cover those who have no plan. If you have no health care, watch for the new trend where hospitals and individual doctors are asking for cash in advance before services are rendered. Think that can’t happen? It’s happening now.

Carlinism: With medical costs so high, your health is your wealth. Most people can’t afford to get sick.