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Conn. hospitals say they’re trapped

yale

The Yale-New Haven Medical Center, centerpiece of Connecticut’s biggest hospital system.

A story in The Connecticut Mirror reported on by Becker’s Hospital Review says  that Medicaid reimbursement cuts and increased taxes are pushing Connecticut’s independent hospitals to  try to join larger systems even as they face with restrictions on health-system growth in the Nutmeg State.

Adding to hospitals’ financial strain, Connecticut Gov. Dannel  Malloy’s administration  has delayed about  $140 million in payments to acute-care hospitals.

And Governor Malloy issued an executive order instructing the Connecticut Department of Public Health to delay final decisions on big hospital mergers or other affiliations until 2017.

Stress-filled days for Connecticut’s hospital executives!

 


Westerly Hospital owner seeks to affiliate with Yale New Haven

watchhill

Watch Hill Harbor. Watch Hill is a particularly rich part of Westerly.

Westerly (R.I.) Hospital’s parent company, Lawrence and Memorial Hospital,  seeks to affiliate  with much larger  and famous Yale New Haven Health System. This would leave Rhode Island’s two dominant hospital systems, Lifespan and Care New England, out  in the cold in an area of southwestern  coastal Rhode Island and southeastern Connecticut with many affluent patients with good private insurance. Lifespan and Care New England themselves have resumed merger talks.

L&M spokesman Michael O’Farrell  told Rhode Island Public Radio that if regulators approve the affiliation,“Yale New Haven Health System will invest $300 million  in eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island.”


Chris Powell: Taxing illness and overpaying hospital execs

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Get sick enough to go to the hospital in Connecticut and you inevitably fall into a web of political deception and corruption.

It’s not just the cost-shifting and concealment that government long has imposed by requiring hospitals to treat the indigent for free, recovering those costs by charging more to paying patients and their insurers, a policy that taxes serious illness and converts hospitals into tax collectors.

In recent years the scheme has grown. Lately state government has been taxing hospitals directly. At first this taxation of hospitals was undertaken in the name of obtaining higher medical reimbursements from the federal government, reimbursements that were to be passed along to the hospitals themselves.

But then state government started keeping the reimbursements for itself, spending the money on other things. Thus the hidden state tax on serious illness grew and, with it, the function of hospitals as tax collectors.

So the public blames rising medical costs on hospitals and insurance companies, not the sneaky elected officials also responsible. State government long has used a similarly dishonest system with electric utilities, requiring them to provide service to the indigent for free and to recover the expense by charging paying customers extra. This policy drives up electricity bills and turns utilities into tax collectors as well, but again elected officials escape the blame; instead it falls on the utilities.

Some state legislators seem to have noticed such policy only recently, but at a General Assembly hearing in February, Gov. Dan Malloy’s budget director, Ben Barnes, was remarkably candid about it. Asked why state government is taxing hospitals, Barnes replied by quoting the career criminal Willie Sutton. When Sutton was asked why he robbed bank, he replied: “That’s where the money is.”

It’s funny that Democrats who purport to sympathize with working people countenance secret sales taxes on the necessities of life. At least these taxes should be shown plainly on hospital and electric bills just as sales taxes are shown on other bills.

Of course, the Democrats’ expressions of concern for working people are just for show. Their main concern is only to feed the machine of government, particularly to sustain the compensation of government’s employees, their party’s base.

Hence Connecticut has not only gotten these secret taxes on serious illness and electricity but soon will have more gambling, on account of provisions in the state budget just passed by the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly – “satellite” casinos to divert the state’s gamblers from new casinos out of state, and the casino game keno, to be installed on computer terminals in bars, more mechanisms for taxing the working class and poor.

Still, state government isn’t the only one exploiting hospitals. They also are being exploited by their own executives, who claim salaries in the hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

While Hartford Hospital has begun laying off hundreds of employees at its facilities around the state, Journal Inquirer Staff Writer Don Michak reports that the hospital recently paid bonuses ranging from $45,000 to $498,000 to 16 executives who were already earning between $300,000 and $2.1 million a year.

Defending such salaries, hospitals say they need to compete for top talent in the market. But just as it is the biggest purchaser of higher education, government makes the market in medical care, too, and government could control excessive salaries in both college and hospital administration any time it wanted to by conditioning its purchases on salary restraint.

While the Malloy administration has injected itself into a hundred trivial things without ever managing to stop the collapse of state government’s finances, it still hasn’t gotten around to the excessive college and hospital executive salaries that state government pays for.

 


Conn. Senate passes big healthcare-system changes

 

The Connecticut state Senate has  passed legislation for major healthcare sector changes aimed  at curbing some facility fees, developing a health-information exchange to guarantee patient-data and aiming to keep private physician practices in business.

Much of it is motivated by the fear that the growing consolidation of physician groups and big hospital systems, such as Yale New Haven, is driving up prices.

 


Conn. private mental-health providers cry for help

 

Connecticut private mental-health providers are confused and angry with state officials telling them to be  “more efficient” amidst more proposed state budget cuts even after years of slashed allocations and rigorous  cost reductions by the providers themselves.

Even some state healthcare officials agree that private providers can provide the same, if not better, services for less than half the cost of state agencies.

The Stamford Advocate notes:

”Testimony submitted last month to the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee by the state Department of Developmental Services notes that while state-run residential facilities can cost upwards of $300,000 annually for each patient, private providers are offering the same services for about $131,000 a year.”

“Even some state healthcare officials agree that private providers can provide the same, if not better, services for less than half the cost of state agencies.”

A major reason for the cost differential; Unionized public employees earn a lot more than private providers’ employees.

 

 


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