Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article on HB 1678 entitled Bill spurs debate on mandatory ER at specialty sites. You may recall a previous discussion about the bill. My guess as to the problem being addressed was close. According to Rep. Charlie Brown:
Rep. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, authored House Bill 1678 because of the new trend of doctor-owned, for-profit specialty hospitals that do not have emergency rooms.
He said emergency care is expensive and the move away from the service is unfair to community hospitals that do run an emergency room and are required by federal law to treat all patients regardless of insurance. The situation has worsened because some more traditional hospitals feel the newer boutique hospitals are siphoning off lucrative patients that have private insurance or Medicare coverage while not doing their share of charity work.
Technorati Tags: HB1678-2007, health care
Actually, I think my guess was darn near right, also. :) I didn’t see anything in the excerpt suggesting that not-for-profit hospitals want to give up having emergency rooms. The problem is the specialty hospitals not always having them, as they have not been required to.
While it is true that “regular” hospitals have to do charity care, that does not mean that the bulk of emergency care is charity care or that emergency departments are not a source of revenue for not-for-profit hospitals. Remember also, that not every uninsured patient is a “charity care” patient. Medicaid patients are also not necessarily “charity care” patients.
This may seem like a tangent, so bear with me.
I remember the Penn Central railroad, prior to being *allowed* to cease all of their passenger operations, had a St. Louis-Pittsburgh run, that ran twice a day. The PC wanted to get rid of the run altogether, but would have been happy enough to just run once daily. The feds said no.
So, like anyone who has to do something they don’t want to, they found a way to meet the letter of the law. They ran the two trains five minutes apart. They met the imposed minimum, and fouled their track with the useless passenger trains for as short a window of time as possible.
I have a concern about hospitals being forced to provide a service when they don’t want to. Chances are, if they really don’t want to provide these services, they’ll do a poor job of it, finding a way to meet the letter of the law if not the spirit.
Oh, and I don’t like a government telling a hospital what’ their share of the chairty work’ is.