California’s Vanishing Community Hospital: An Endangered Institution0

This article first appeared in the Fall 2011 Issue of California Health Law News, a Publication of the California Society of Healthcare Attorneys.

Across the nation, America’s community hospitals are under siege. Once considered indispensible to our health care system, the twenty-first century finds the local hospital fighting an uphill battle against a convergence of factors that favors the sharing of resources by multiple facilities.  Rising health care expenses, challenging regulatory hurdles, and a reimbursement structure in the midst of transition all bear some responsibility for the obstacles faced by today’s community hospital.  Nowhere is this phenomenon more pronounced than in California, where regular hospital closings amid an ever-growing population stand as incentive for remaining hospitals to team up (or remain teamed up) under the potentially false notion that in modern American health care, there is safety in numbers.

Learning From Past Mistakes – What History Reveals About Health Care

Understanding the historical evolution of the American hospital is fundamental to recognizing the core problems faced by smaller hospitals today.  From the 1736 opening of an almshouse in New York City (which would eventually become Bellevue Hospital) through the expansion to nearly 5,000 hospitals by the 1920s, and continuing through the post-1960 shift toward multifunctional facilities, health care has responded to the socioeconomic and political influences of each era.  A trend of multihospital systems replacing freestanding community hospitals picked up speed after 1965, driven largely by a combination of economic factors (including the creation of Medicare) and technological advances in medicine.  The five hospital consolidations noted in 1961 ballooned to upwards of fifty per year in the 1970s.  By the 1980s, an estimated thirty percent of the hospital beds in the United States existed within hospital systems.[1] … Read more →

Our Fear of Health Care Reform and the Household Vacuum0

“That’s the nice thing about carousels, they always play the same songs.”  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

This article first appeared on the PBS affiliated website This Emotional Life.

It starts with a vacuum.

The sudden, unfamiliar dissonance signals fear in his little mind, which grows quickly, magnified by the sight of an unexpected entanglement between the woman he trusts most and this monstrous machine. As he turns to run (or crawl), I find myself thankful to be just inches away, in perfect position to catch my 10-month old boy as he does his best to flee the frightful scene. His two outstretched arms secure a tight grip around my neck, while a sad face burrows deep into my chest. For one sharp moment I feel like a hero, a wholly necessary, trustworthy entity whose sole purpose is to be relied upon in times of trouble.

Fear is a formidable foe, and the ways in which we as grown ups react to its presence can often be inconsistent. Regardless of its origin, any meaningful cause for alarm typically signifies a commonality of chaos, to be first understood, and then vanquished. Though my son’s safety was obviously never compromised during his run-in with the vacuum cleaner, his reaction illustrates the fact that in the eyes of an infant the world is full of uncertainties. In the mind of a child, laughter and tears coexist every day, yet we seldom stop to consider how these emotions actually resonate. Rather, we tend to focus on the cause, which with luck might lead us to a solution, as a means to restore the calm and save the day. Indeed, some of the most seasoned parents have an entire cache of remedies upon which to rely when a crisis hits, and they wield them like weapons of precision, each one crafted and selected for just the right moment.

But what about the child in the midst of a trauma?  … Read more →

Providing Care for the Uninsured Without the Federal Case0

The article first appeared in Becker’s Hospital Review.

Estimated at close to 50 million strong, the fate of America’s uninsured has caused quite a stir of late. As the media anxiously reports on the U.S. Supreme Court’s acquiescence to assess the constitutionality of certain tenets at the heart of healthcare reform, the nation sits anxiously on the sidelines, awaiting the outcome. Indeed, a suggested, unprecedented televised hearing on the insurance mandate could potentially attract even more viewers than the record-breaking 111 million football fans who watched the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers in Superbowl XLV on Feb. 6, 2011.

The uninsured conundrum

At the core of the debate lies an enormous price tag. The sheer volume in dollars it takes to provide medical treatment to the uninsured is astounding, and its ramifications affect many fundamental aspects of our healthcare structure. In 2008, uncompensated medical care in the United States approached an estimated $57 billion, of which nearly $43 billion was paid by federal, state and local governments from funds earmarked for this very purpose. Although the federal government typically foots close to half of this annual bill, its contribution equals only 2 percent of federal healthcare spending yearly. The great bulk of responsibility for America’s uninsured falls to our nation’s hospitals, who shoulder approximately 60 percent of uncompensated medical care, due largely to a regulatory structure mandating that emergency departments at hospitals participating in Medicare or Medicaid must treat just about anyone who arrives in need of medical care, regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.

To add to the friction, most Americans have a stronger grasp on the rules of professional cricket than they do the leading constitutional challenge to President Obama’s 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. … Read more →