Broward Health Don't Need No Stinkin' Stark Law
- Not!NOTE: Never mind that the North Broward Hospital District is one of the nation's ten largest public health care systems in the nation.
Because without the New Times intrepid blogster Tom Francis, the health care juggernaut would be free to operate with callous impunity – thanks to the dismal blend of indifference and ignorance that define's local print journalism.
For example, here's a dismal District goody you'll never read in the shrinking Sun-Sentinel with its journalistically challenged medical writers:
With an annual budget of more than $3 billion, the tax-funded District is a modern day monument to Socialized Medicine at its worst, over-paying scores of doctors to care for a host of well-insured patients – and losing millions of dollars in the process.
Last year, for example, dba as Broward Health, the District lost more than $17 million bankrolling the practices of nearly 40 physicians paid to care for several thousand private patients.
Ten years before, in FY 1999, the tax-funded Hospital District lost some $4 million, funding the practices of 16 private physicians.
Bottom line?
During the past decade, the District-operated private physician practices lost a combined total of more than $100 million.
This breaks down to an average loss of more than $90 for each patient visit to a District's financed physician.
The good news for the District – and bad news for taxpayers?
The District easily covers its physician practice losses by dipping into the nearly $200 million in local property taxes it collects every year – allegedly for the care of indigent patients.
Oh yes....
When it comes to the private physician practices bankrolled by the District, poor and uninsured patients are as rare as pork eaters in Dubai.
Just consider the contrast in the 2009 for:
All District health care services
Uninsured* 19.5%
Insured* – 80.5%
District operated physician practices
Uninsured* – 4.7%
Insured* – 95.3%
*percent of total gross patient care charges
Finally, in bankrolling its over-paid collection of private physician, the district also covers the entire cost of the doctors' overhead – including the cost of office staff, rent, furniture, utilities and supplies.
Best of all, there no need for the district-bankrolled private physicians to sweat malpractice insurance – thanks to Broward Health's sovereign immunity which limits the district's liability to Tort peanuts as a governmental agency.
Anyhow....
What we have here is merely the tip of a very nasty iceberg created by the Stark Law**, which prohibits hospitals violating Federal anti-trust laws.
**Fans of the New Times' Tom Francis may recall how the District commissioners last year fired their in house lawyer after he wrote a memo suggesting they were in violation of the Federal anti-trust regulations detailed in the Stark Law – which was sort of like the Titanic shit-canning any look-out who talked about icebergs.
Tomorrow: Broward Health's Million Dollar Docs
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