Not just a Natchez problem?
Published Thursday, March 6, 2008
I just saw this article about HMA's looming debt worries and it occurs to me that many of us don't realize that what's facing Natchez Regional Medical is facing hospitals all over the country.
The article mentions the possibility that some of HMA's assets could be sold. Interesting given all of the fervor surrounding Natchez Regional's debt concerns.
Comments
Kevin, did you publish the article in the ND??
Wow...now two major health providers with problems.
For HMA...the local area has absolutely no control over the decision makers and their decisions.....Naples will do what is best for Naples!!!
For NRMC ...the county/locals have to deal with this one. The HMA issue only makes NRMC that much more complicated and unpredictable.
A perfect storm!
This is not a new phenomenon; nor is it limited to NRMC and HMA.
In 1988 I went to work for Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, which was founded by 2 women in the early 1900s to provide care to indigent children. In 1988 the hospital was still providing care to a lot of indigent children, plus many others as well--and it was about to go broke. Same for the hospital across the street, Truman Medical Center, which also served a largely uninsured population, and so also ran in the red most of the time. Kansas City passed a "Health Levy" (tax) the following year, and both hospitals stayed afloat. Around the same time, University Hospital, which was affiliated with the school of osteopathic medicine, DID go under, just shut its doors--leaving a lot of patients in the proverbial lurch, as well as a lot of medical students, who were then forced to scramble to find places to get the clinical training they needed.
It wasn't just Kansas City, and hospital closings were just the tip of the healthcare "revolution" or evolution iceberg.
If you want to know where the problem truly started, you have to go back to when people here in the U.S. began getting their healthcare paid for mostly with someone else's money--not just Medicare and Medicaid, but commercial insurance, as well. That had the natural effect of driving up demand: Before someone else started paying the bill for you, you would have thought twice about going to a doctor or an emergency room for a sniffle or a bellyache or whatever--when you have to pay the bill yourself, you ask yourself first whether you really need a doctor's help.
Anyway, as demand skyrocketed, so did prices. Third-party payors (insurance companies, Medicaid, Medicare) started to feel the crunch in about the 1980s, and realized they had to do something. Basic lesson: Insurance only "works" if more people DON'T use it, than do. It takes the premiums paid by, say, 10 people who do not use a service to pay the cost of the one person among them who does. In the beginning, this worked out great because most people were still of the mindset that doctors and emergency rooms were for emergencies. We don't have that mindset anymore.
The great healthcare debate in this country right now is over how to make somebody else pay for services rendered to individuals. We all want free healthcare, basically, even the politicians. And the healthcare industry, every part of it, wants that great cash cow to keep "nurturing" them.
Guess what? The party's over, not just here in Natchez, but all over the country. There simply is no way for it to continue.
Will the Natchez Regional Medical Center Board ever talk to us employees and inform us of the current situation? Do they even care what the employees think?
I wonder how many people can go a year without seeing a doctor?
From 1996 to 2001, I never saw a doctor. No money, no insurance. I am as healthy as a horse. In 2001, I started seeing a psychiatrist for 2 years. (don't laugh, I've spotted a few more on this forum that could benefit from one). I go to pathology for blood work and they send it to my doctor. Every 6 months, he calls in my prescriptions. I had to have emergency surgery in 2005. That was the last time I had to see a doctor. My grandmother died when she was 96. She saw a doctor once in her life, and took an aspirin once. Never anything else. She also had 9 kids.
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