The headline – “Hospital: Solve bigger problem // Medicare payment system is broken, Reid chief says”
From this headline, I took away that the hospital executive said that Medicare was the problem. What he (Reid Memorial Hospital President Craig Kinyon) actually said was:
KINYON: We have gone from trying to fix the uninsured, to expanding Medicare, and we still have a broken Medicare system of reimbursement. Uninsured (bad debt and charity care) are about $36 million a year at Reid. Health care reform costs to fix this nationally are about $1 trillion. Medicare and Medicaid write-offs, NOT paid by Medicare/Medicaid and/or the patient are over $180 million per year.
There is NO mention of relief for this bigger and out of hand problem.
For the insured patient, 47 cents on every dollar we charge goes to pay for Medicare/Medicaid, bad debt/charity writeoffs.
So, what he actually said, apparently, was that when lumped together Medicare, Medicaid, bad debt, and charity adds $0.47 to the cost of privately insured patients. We don’t know whether Medicare is a substantial factor in this write-up. (It’s kind of like the joke about how, when Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average patron is worth millions.) If, for example, Medicare was a small part of the problem in the equation, and the uninsured were a big part of the problem, then moving a bunch of the patients from the “uninsured” column to the “Medicare” column, that $0.47 would go down.
And if Medicare is such a problem, I guess I don’t understand why every medical provider doesn’t opt out, charge the remaining patients 1/3 less, and corner the market.
47 cents? No it is trillions!! Just listen to the gop and the idiots like bayh who say this will add a trillion dollars—over ten years to our 2.5 trillion annual medical spending. So in the end it is not much per year and even less per person.
Did you see the pearlstein piece on the good mitch in the Post? I know I read most of the piece somewhere else at least 3 times and the rest chooses to omit anything the good mitch did wrong. He is just so beloved and good for Indiana :(
Minor correction: The name of the hospital is Reid Hospital & Health Care Services. It has not been Reid Memorial Hospital since the 1990s.
My mistake. I clearly haven’t been back in awhile. I wonder if Daniel would approve of the name change. I think he intended the gift as a memorial to his wife and son who died before him.
That’s an interesting question. Personally, I think that the name change is a disgrace and completely unwarranted, mainly done to boost a particular person’s ego. The reason given at the time was that Reid is not only an inpatient hospital, it has outpatient services, etc., etc. You could say that about almost every hospital operating in the United States. Hardly a good reason to change the name of the hospital.
I used to be a member of Reid Memorial Presbyterian Church (sadly, the church is on the verge of closing.) Anyway, rumor had it that Daniel Reid had stipulated that if the church’s name were ever changed, that the church would revert back to him or his heirs. Remember those hypotheticals from property class: O conveys such and such real property to A, but if alcohol is ever sold on the premises then the property would revert back to O or his heirs? Supposedly Daniel Reid had done something similar with the church. The church never changed its name, but when we wondered if something similar had been done with the hospital. Could be a moot point anyway, as the clause may well have not been valid. Nevertheless, if such a clause existed, it gives you some idea that Daniel Reid was very serious about naming the hospital and the church in memory of his family.