By Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Ron-Gong Lin II
Los Angeles Times
February 17, 2010
Emergency room doctors and on-call specialists treating poor, uninsured patients at private hospitals in Los Angeles County saw their reimbursement rate slashed by county supervisors Tuesday.
The rate cut could lead private hospitals to close emergency rooms and send more patients to crowded county hospitals, officials said.
L.A. County reimburses doctors 27% of estimated fees for patients’ first three days of care at private hospitals under the Physician Services for Indigents Program. Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to reduce the rate to 18% as of July 1.
The county had expected to pay doctors with $9 million from the state’s Emergency Medical Services Appropriation. But state lawmakers eliminated the fund, and as the number of uninsured grows, private doctors are expected to file more claims than ever with the county this year, Meyer said.
More than half of Los Angeles County’s 72 hospitals are operating at a deficit and two are in bankruptcy, Lott said (Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California). Countywide, 11 hospitals have closed since 2002, all of which had emergency rooms, he said.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/17/local/la-me-supes-uninsured17-2010feb17
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
“The County” – a hospital to which emergency patients with no money and no insurance are shipped. Most of us remember when The County was always the provider of last resort.
No longer. Any hospital with an emergency room, for humane reasons, must now provide emergency services to any person who presents with a bona fide emergency, regardless of the ability to pay. Unfortunately, the change in attitude of some occurred only after it became a criminal offense to fail to recognize that “ship ’em to The County” fell short of a humane response. The fact that this legislation was needed should not reflect on the great many dedicated professionals who have always been ready to help, without any regard to the financial status of the patient.
But what about paying for this care? Should the private hospitals and physicians write this off as charity? When operating at a deficit with bankruptcy around the corner, that won’t work. Should the county, as the health care provider of last resort, pay for at least the costs of the care? State and local governments are struggling with deficits in their budgets. The 18 percent payment by Los Angeles County’s Physician Services for Indigents Program obviously won’t cover costs. And the state certainly is not helping by eliminating their Emergency Medical Services Appropriation.
There is a way we could do this. We could establish a single payer national health program – an improved and expanded Medicare that includes everyone. Under such a system, even those physicians who have had difficulty understanding a humane health care system would change their response. When that emergency call comes in that always means another paying patient, it will become natural for those physicians to say, “Ship ’em here!”