Discounting Hospital Care To Poor Brings Hard Choices | WSJ | 6.24.04 (subscription)
An unemployed man with $40,000 in the bank has a $2,500 hospital bill. A widow with almost $80,000 has a hospital bill of more than $14,000.
Which one deserves a discount? …
The American Hospital Association recently asked its 4,800 member institutions to adopt guidelines stressing the need for charity care and humane collections. More than half the hospitals said they had either looked closely at how they treat needy patients or were in the process of doing so. …
Michael Dowling, chief executive of the North Shore-LIJ system, sees a bigger problem — that hospital charity programs are being asked to take up the slack for America’s nearly 44 million uninsured. “The policy makers have to get to the fundamental policy issue: You have tens of millions of people without insurance,” he says. “If everybody had some form of coverage and you had universal insurance, you would mitigate the need for all these elaborate programs and debates.”
Whatever the outcome of the ramping up Not–for–Profit Hospital litigations, it will make any and all attempts at discounting for the ever growing number of uninsured customers of healthcare more problematic.