Friday, September 18, 2009

Water Glass Sign


(Some delusional patients are very prone to suggestions. The best are those in DTs. You can hand them a glass of water and ask them what color the liquid is and they will answer every color you can imagine even though they can see that it is just a glass of water.)

I had to go to the board of trustees meeting for the medical center. The trustees are an interesting group, some are local businessmen, several are in politics and one is very wealthy thanks to his inheritance. He is a proud fixture of the local democratic party and a major donor for them. I usually like to sit next to him just to see if anything is sinking in.

Anyway, the meeting's purpose was to explain why the medical center was shutting down most of its community outreach programs such as the diabetic teaching centers and local physical therapy centers as well as decreasing its overall staff. It also explained why it was shutting down two of the outside local satellite hospitals. Of course this created an uproar and the trustees wanted to know why.

Out came the numbers. Although the overall number or patients for all areas of the medical center was increasing (inpatient, outpatient and ancillaries such as diagnostic) the ratio of government insurance to private insurance was increasing. Simply put, the hospital was seeing more people with government insurance than private insurance and was therefore going broke. In fact, the center was losing money hand over fist. Even though it is seeing more patients, since they had Medicare or Medicaid it cost more to take care of them than they got from the government.

As this information was being digested by the trustees, I looked around to see the 3 Democratic politicians in the room. They were squirming a bit in their chairs. Before I could even look at Mr. Trust Fund, he spoke out and said it will "all be better with Obama's health care plan once we have a "public option". He said this after we had just seen graph after graft showing that the more goverment insurance we got, the worse we were! I wanted so hard to ask him what color the water was in his glass!!

2 comments:

Andrew_M_Garland said...

The push for healthcare reform is motivated by our current financial disaster, and I don't mean the recession and housing crisis. Congress has promised Medicare, Medicaid, Prescription Drug, and Social Security services over the next 75 years that are $88.8 trillion ($88,600 billion) unfunded.

The public discussion is about the burden of $1 trillion ($1,000 billion) in extra taxes over 10 years. The true shortfall is 12 times as much, more than $1 trillion per year.

The Democratic "solution" to this political and economic problem is to put everyone into one medical care pot. We then all get equal amounts of services at whatever high tax rate the government can levy. The young must be coerced into this system, to extract as much money as possible to serve the old.

Obamacare Bails Out Medicare

Joke: We lose money on every patient, but we plan to make it up on volume.

I think this is funny, but ObamaCare thinks it is a plan.
 

SeaSpray said...

Why are they so hellbent on pushing this through for 15% of the population (if stats are correct)and long term consequences for everyone be damned?

It baffles me.

Why don't they just open up the borders for insurance purchase.. let competition drive the prices down for a better product, work on the tort reform and perhaps ins will be more affordable, thus less uninsured? Why do they not see where this has compromised quality care in other countries? I don't pretend to understand it all and they apparently don't either.. but I do have common sense and can plainly see it will go bust and then we'll be in worse shape.

I really want to know why they think it will work and is so good. ? Nothing is free. There is always a trade off somewhere.