Homegrown Healthcare Bullshit
Which is why we have the current health care reform debacle in Congress.
It's not that officials, politicians and lobbyists lie.
Rather, they rarely tell the whole truth.
Which, by any other name, is still an exotic form of bullshit.
Take the current health care hoo-hah in Miami-Dade County involving a health care street fight between officials at the University of Miami's medical school and the staff of the giant tax-funded Jackson Memorial hospital system
As detailed on today's front page of the Miami Herald following a snarky meeting between officials from the two hospital systems:
“The tension between the two healthcare giants raises questions about which is the best place to get treatment.
At the meeting, “Jackson (officials) presented data that showed its number of patients with insurance dropping in recent months while uninsured patients kept increasing.”
Miami Med School officials, on the other hand, “complained about Jackson's lack of investment in new technology” and failure to cooperate “with UM on malpractice suits.”
In addition, the head of UM's Med School claimed Jackson was in a slide to become “just another gritty, charity-based hospital.”
But it gets worse....
Scrape away the hype and rhetoric, and the whole thing boils down to Jackson Memorial officials accusing UM doctors of cherry-picking the sick and the suffering – by sending their uninusured patients to Jackson and their paying patients to the two hospitals operated by the Medical School.
Which is lightyears removed from any plotline on TV medical shows like House, Three Rivers, or Gray's Anatomy – where the last thing the actor-doctors sweat is a patient's insurance.
So much for a bullshit laden microcosm of healthcare reform in our own backyard.
The truth?
After years in a partnership that saw UM using Jackson Memorial as its teaching hospital, the University bought the neighboring Cedars Medical Center from the for-profit hopsital chain HCA for some $260 million in December of 2007* -- thus entering into competition with the public health care system . (*Before acquiring Cedars (located across from Jackson Memorial's main campus), UM's med school operated the 40-bed University of Miami Hospital & Clinic.)
Given this history, consider the following data which provides a rather unique context to the current pissing match between UM and Jackson:
2007 2008 % change
Hospitals
UM System 40 beds 600 beds 1400%
Total Profit $13,002,201 $24,422,971 148%
Per Adj. Patient Day $269 $203 (25%)
Jackson System 2,139 beds 2,139 beds 0%
Total Profit $26,895,780 $91,927,647 233%
Per Adj. Patient Day $42 $139 231%
NOTE: An Adjusted Patient Day is a baseline used
by the nation's healthcare industry to reflect a hospital's
inpatient and outpatient population.
Source: Agency for Health Care Administration
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