Hospitals defeated in bid to block rival
By Darrell R. Santschi
The Press-Enterprise
September 7, 2005
More than a month into one of the most bitterly divisive public debates in Loma Linda’s 35-year history, three City Council members voted Tuesday night to issue a permit to build a specialty hospital here.
In so doing, Mayor Floyd Petersen and Councilmen Charles Umeda and Robert Christman rejected a consortium of area community hospitals’ argument that it was up to the city to prevent the specialty hospital from “cherry picking” patients for lucrative surgical procedures, which the hospitals say will jeopardize their emergency and indigent care.
The 28-bed California Heart and Surgical Hospital is to be built at the northeast corner of Barton Road and New Jersey Street, not far from two of the proposal’s biggest detractors: Redlands Community Hospital and Loma Linda University Medical Center.
In the end, the three council members said they didn’t see it as their responsibility to settle issues that they say the state and federal governments should be addressing.
At the Aug. 23 hearing, Dr. William Plested, president-elect of the American Medical Association, contended that specialty hospitals force nonprofit general hospitals to innovate.
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/
PE_News_Local_C_hospital07.13717ca7.html
Comment: Just imagine that the $1.9 trillion that we are already spending on health care was in a single, taxpayer-funded pool. That’s not a far reach of imagination since 60% of that spending is already through the tax system.
As taxpayers, what would we want the stewards of our health care system to do in this situation?
Would we want our cardiac surgery services for our community to be delivered in a full-service, tertiary-level, not-for-profit Center of Excellence, or would we want to have our cardiac surgery done in a limited facility, devoid of other hospital support services, and managed with the primary intent of maximizing profit for passive investors?
What about joint replacement? If something went wrong, perhaps resulting in renal shutdown, does it seem reasonable that you would have to be transferred, while critically ill, to a real, full-service hospital, one with a renal team that could better manage your complication?
We would never allow our public funds to be placed in the hands of special interests more concerned about profit than the public good. We would demand regional planning to enable optimal use of our finite resources. What is ironic is that we are not already making this demand, but that has more to do with our current, inefficient, fragmented system of funding care. There are far better systems that would greatly improve our resource allocation; single payer certainly comes to mind.
AMA president-elect William Plested, himself a cardiovascular surgeon, seems to suggest that the technological innovations developed in our academic medical centers could continue to take place only if dollars are drained from our system to support highly profitable, private, special interests, competing in the marketplace, entities that are relieved of any obligation to provide emergency, indigent or other money-losing services. What nonsense.
Once again, the AMA demonstrates that we should not look to it for leadership in solving the problems of our health care crisis. The PNHP voice is needed now, more than ever.