The city's cash-strapped public hospital system will have to bring in hundreds of thousands more patients to overcome its dire financial troubles, Health and Hospitals Corp. President Ram Raju said Tuesday.
In a speech to hundreds of hospital workers, Raju pledged to increase the number of patients using the system’s 11 hospitals and other facilities to 2 million annually by 2020 from the current 1.4 million. And he said the hospitals corporation would double the number of people enrolled in its MetroPlus health insurance plan to 1 million during the same period.
The hospital system has been bleeding cash for years, and faces a $753 million deficit next year, which will balloon to $1.5 billion by 2019.
And because of Obamacare, the agency faces deep cuts to federal aid traditionally funneled to hospitals that care for large numbers of uninsured patients. Under that law, the Health and Hospitals Corp. expects to lose $180 million in 2017, and a total of $3 billion by 2024.
At the same time, hospital officials expect they’ll still have to care for many people who can’t get insurance despite Obamacare, particularly undocumented immigrants.
Bringing in more patients who have insurance or can pay for care will help offset those cuts, Raju said.
13 comments:
Healthy people suck?
Packing the ER and beds with patients is the goal?
What are they running,
A hospital or hotel
Its all money all the time.frauds
Audit the books,if their bleeding cash their over billing just to stay in buissness,
They hire the lowest skilled now just to cut cost for more Profit
Well that's because most of the people who go to those hospitals are illegals. I use to work at coney island hospital and I use to do fee scaling and 99 percent people who were fee scaled were illegals from mexico, south American countries or Russia. It was so ridiculous. Fee scaling works like this, if you don't have medical insurance, you can bring your bill down to the hospital where they issue you your clinic cards and depending on how much money you make, your bill can be knocked down to as little as 10 dollars (10 dollars for illegals) and as little as 15 dollars for regular citizens, for regular citizens it could have been more than 15 dollars because it goes based on your pay. Illegals only had to show a handwritten letter from their employer saying that they make so much money a week (it could have been a made up letter for all we know) and we as workers were forced to reduce their 1500 dollar bill to 10 bucks (for illegals)! 10 bucks was for each visit they made to the hospital and for regular citizens it was Atleast 15 dollars per visit depending on your paycheck!
We also had a man in the office who's desk was piled with returned bills because the people who were rushed to the emergency room would give fake addresses so these bills would say "return to sender - no one by that name lives here" on the envelope! This was 12 years ago, so even then I knew the hhc system was flawed and going to go broke back then even!
'Bringing in more patients who have insurance or can pay for care will help offset those cuts, Raju said.'
How? At the point of a gun?
You want to bring in paying customers? Improve care. Decrease wait times. Clean the place up.
All of that is impossible when you are swamped with hordes of uninsured/illegals.
Don't worry, Obama and Deblazio are letting thousands of illegals in every day to this country and city. They love free healthcare and visiting the hospital for every bump scratch and cough. We will fill the hospitals up more in no time. We can up the wait times from a current 6 hours to six days and celebrate our diversity while we do it!
Sell all of HHC and build one large Municipal Hospital for the uninsured. Urgent Care's are popping up all over and are doing well. You don't need a ER for a cold, fever, sprain, or splinters. Let hospitals become private like LIJ.
Where would you go if you needed treament HHC or LIJ ?
When Anthony Weiner was a Congressman pushing for Obama Care he reasoned that we had to do something because the system was broken. When I pointed out to him that illegals were the major cause of the broken system he told me that was a separate issue. Well Carlos, I guess I was right and the system is still broken.
4/9/15 NPR Morning Edition re. Fire Dept swamped by non-emergency ER runs... innovative solution: tele-conferencing with emergency-trained MDs, who can set up appointnments and even pre-paid car service. Several hundred vs. thousands of dollars...
Charging future demacacrats for healthcare is fighting against everything Obama,DiBlasio and the Democratic Party stands for and we will never let that happen as long as there is a US Veteran or Tax paying citizen alive to Pick Up Our Bill
Be Nice to us because we will be the Majority soon and we Won't Forget how you treated US
Se Se Puedo..
The hospital should give out free knifes and guns in the gettoes if they want more patients
And to think the government wanted us to be healthy,what BS
Rent the unused beds to the Homeless and bill medicare
3 day maximum stay with a revolving door policy!!
My Doctor use3d to work out of St. Johns in Elmhurst and he was on the board of directors, Once when I had my checkup in the office he vented to me. He predicted the hospital would close in a few years and 2 years before broke ties with the Hospital. He said anyone who come to the emergency room with insurance is an idiot. Show up with whatever they must treat you, to the best (no malpractice lawsuit) give them any name & address (it's illegal to force or deny treatment for no ID = Lawsuit) and they must treat you. and walk out. They send bill to address nothing return to sender, Able to state and feds for indigent coverage. Feds investigate and don't pay since you file tooooooo many of these claims vs paying people and soon your out of business. This is the future of our health care system.
Remember to the politicians they are "guests" in this country and we have to help them. and it's an insignificant number so 1 or 2 will not effect the hospitals profit.
This is not a surprise. Hell, its not even an unintended consequence of the design of the system, it is the intended consequence that public entities drove private and non-profit hospitals out of business. And now complain about funding - but being HHC, the last hospital standing, they have to remain open at whatever cost.
HHC rebuilt many of the wards at Goldwater Hospital right before it was closed and sold by Mayor Bloomberg to become the Cornell tech campus. Millions wasted rebuilding right before the sale is not smart.
Post a Comment