Some public hospitals win, others lose with Obamacare, Reuters, July 23, 2015, NBC News: “A year and a half after the Affordable Care Act brought widespread reforms to the U.S. healthcare system, Chicago’s Cook County Health & Hospitals System has made its first profit in 180 years. Seven hundred miles south, the fortunes of Atlanta’s primary public hospital, Grady Health System, haven’t improved, and it remains as dependent as ever on philanthropy and county funding to stay afloat. The disparity between the two ‘safety net’ hospitals, both of which serve a disproportionate share of their communities’ poorest patients, illustrates a growing divide nationwide…”
Tag: Hospitals
Medicaid Expansion and Safety-Net Hospitals
Economy boosts safety-net hospitals in states not expanding Medicaid, By Phil Galewitz, March 1, 2015, Washington Post: “Hospitals that treat many poor and uninsured patients were expected to face tough financial times in states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That’s because they would get less Medicare and Medicaid funding under the health-care law, while still having to provide high levels of charity care. But in some of the largest states that did not expand Medicaid, many ‘safety net’ hospitals fared pretty well last year — better than in 2013 in many cases, according to their financial documents…”
Medical-Legal Partnerships
Need a doctor? This anti-poverty program will get you a lawyer, too, By Seth Freed Wessler and Kat Aaron, December 13, 2014, NBC News: “When Tony Cox, 53, woke up in the hospital after suffering a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job, he figured he’d hit bottom. ‘All I could think about was getting better and getting back to my family,’ he says. But that day in the hospital was not his lowest point. Over a year later, a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the modest two-bedroom house Cox shares with his wife Donna and their now 16-year-old son bearing a notice that their home was in foreclosure. Out of work from the injury, Cox had fallen behind on mortgage payments. ‘We were getting ready to be homeless, to move in with family,’ Donna says. ‘We would have been separated.’ The couple tried to catch up, to renegotiate their mortgage, but could not make the payments—not until they sought help from a legal services attorney, who brought the foreclosure case to court and compelled the bank to renegotiate the terms of their loan. Over the coming years, the person who saved Cox from the worst consequence of his heart attack was not a doctor but a lawyer…”