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Originally Posted by saden1
LOL...I find it super hilarious the same people against universal healthcare are against it because it would mess with government payments to hospitals. I wonder Mr. S10, how many of your hospital's Medicaid patients are emergency care patients.
I say do it right, raise taxes, insure everyone and keep rural hospitals open but weak-ass Obama isn't going to do that. What kind of a public plan is it anyways if there aren't even government hospitals? Perhaps it's time to let those rural hospitals be taken over by the government? If they can't survive on their on to begin with why not turn them into government hospitals? Alternatively we can let them people go ahead and just die.
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I'm not sure why you're talking about rural hospitals? Ours are inner city Philadelphia, in the poorest section of town.
To answer your question, about 55% of our Medicaid patients are emergency, 30% are maternity, and the rest elective.
The point isn't that we shouldn't have to take care of them. The point is without the Disproportionate Share payments,
there won't be a hospital anymore. Our University can't afford to subsidize losses as massive as this would generate.
Based on your response, which was pretty confusing, I'm not sure you fully understand. My point is we're already a government hospital in a lot of respects. We get an $80 million lump sum payment annually from the government just to keep us in business. We need to keep getting that government payment or we'll go out of business.
Being run by the government won't solve anything. Believe me, our management has us running lean and mean, our staffing levels are low. A takeover by government management would not yield any expense reductions. We don't need to be run by the government, we just need to be propped up by the government.
That is if you want poor people to have any healthcare at all. That's reality.