Some Hospitals Call 911 to Save Their Patients | NYT | 4.2.07
Should a hospital be able to handle a medical emergency?
The answer may seem self-evident. But patients at some hospitals may find the staff resorting to what someone might do at home in a crisis: call 911 for an ambulance.
That happened recently in Texas, where a 44-year-old man named Steve Spivey developed breathing problems after spine surgery. No physician was working there when the staff first recognized he was in trouble. They phoned 911, and he was taken to a nearby full-service hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
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The doctors who set up the specialized hospitals defend them by saying that by running the centers themselves and concentrating only on certain procedures, they can provide the best results for patients.
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“The problem with physician-owned specialty hospitals is that decision-making is more likely to be driven by financial interest rather than patient interest,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who is a longtime critic of such hospitals.
“You see it in the cherry-picking of patients, and with policies that instruct hospital staff to call 911 for the local community hospital if emergency care is needed,” said Mr. Grassley, a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees Medicare.
Supporting his effort is the committee’s chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, who leads the subcommittee on health for the House Committee on Ways and Means.
Steve Spivey joins Helen Wilson—”there is something fundamentally wrong with a hospital that utilizes the EMS system to provide a critical service.”
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I think you are missing the point, it is the physicians and their investors that are acting just like the ones you are indicting, "the legal profession, the insurance cartels, the pharmaceutical companies...." Profit has motivated the creation of specialized hospitals that lack basic safety features.
Your statement, "[t]he issue is not what those with, can afford, but what those without, can not afford[,]" has no logical relevance to the article. Specialty hospitals *only* cater to those with the ability to pay.
This article is, plain and simple, another example of cream-skimming the healthcare dollar, and doing so in a manner that may potentially harm or kill the very clients they seek. Trading a savings for a potential threat is not a wise investment.
As more cases of harm and death mount, Congressional angst will rise and specialty hospitals will become the subject of ever increasing regulatory burden and their profitability may very well vanish. They may die, not because they are not successful, but because they are not safe.
The other side of the coin, which I have touched upon before, is what is the cost of cream-skimming to acute care hospitals and the overall cost to healthcare in the communities served by specialty hospitals. A search in this blog on "specialty hospital" will show several related articles.