Mercy Hospital layoffs/furloughs. Why?

[Dumpstick]

... weren't uninsured people mainly using the ER as their healthcare?
The Emergency Room/Departments are still open and visits are down; how big of a source of revenue is/was these ER's compared to the rest of a typical hospital?

I can help with this. I was on the Board of Trustees for the Logan County Hospital, before we sold it to Mercy system.

The ER was a HUGE money pit. We lost an enormous amount of money in the ER, every month, continuously.

I would be willing to lay odds that every hospital will say the same.

Under US law, no one can be turned away from the emergency room, regardless of ability to pay. The patient must be stabilized at the very least, before they can be transferred.
The patient cannot be transferred to another facility without the 2nd facility agreeing.

No hospital will agree too accept a stabilized, non-emergency patient that cannot pay.

The patient cannot be just turned out, until they are healed. So, once stabilized, they become that hospitals' responsibility. Pay or no pay.

Every person that came on the door of the ER was/is a cost.

That is why you see hospitals being built without an ER attached. There may be an adjacent ER, but not in that hospital.

It's also why you see ads from hospitals to call in on your way to the ER. Calling in makes it an appointment, and they can refuse appointments from people that can't pay.

 

[CHenry]

I can help with this. I was on the Board of Trustees for the Logan County Hospital, before we sold it to Mercy system.

The ER was a HUGE money pit. We lost an enormous amount of money in the ER, every month, continuously.

I would be willing to lay odds that every hospital will say the same.

Under US law, no one can be turned away from the emergency room, regardless of ability to pay. The patient must be stabilized at the very least, before they can be transferred.
The patient cannot be transferred to another facility without the 2nd facility agreeing.

No hospital will agree too accept a stabilized, non-emergency patient that cannot pay.

The patient cannot be just turned out, until they are healed. So, once stabilized, they become that hospitals' responsibility. Pay or no pay.

Every person that came on the door of the ER was/is a cost.

That is why you see hospitals being built without an ER attached. There may be an adjacent ER, but not in that hospital.

It's also why you see ads from hospitals to call in on your way to the ER. Calling in makes it an appointment, and they can refuse appointments from people that can't pay.

Thats interesting
So why would they build an ER without a hospital? St Anthony did that in Mustang.

 

[Aries]

I am doing all I can to help the medical care industry. I've had a broken rib and a surgery in the last six weeks.

Aw, man, now I feel bad for making a sympathy play. LOL!

But it's a happy ending, so don't feel too bad for me.

I guess I blacked out one morning, and broke my rib in the fall. Didn't remember it until later in the day, I just had a very fuzzy memory of waking up on the bathroom floor.

But in the meantime, I went to the emergency room with a sharp pain in my upper abdomen. Since I didn't remember blacking out and falling at that point, they ended up doing a number of tests, and finally a CT scan to identify the source of the pain. The CT scan indicated a mass on my kidney, that had not metastasized.

So... they removed the kidney, and verified with biopsies that it was cancer, but had not spread anywhere, so it's been completely removed.

So the broken rib and inability to remember what caused it turned out to be very fortunate. And I'm all but recovered from the surgery. And I found out a lot more people care about me than I would have guessed (or at least acted like they do, LOL!).

 

[sedona]

A nurse friend of mine told me that when someone comes in with a gun shot wound a lot of times depending how bad it is it can cost $100,000.00 or more.She worked in a hospital near the ghetto and it happened pretty often.She told me there were a lot of unnecessary expensive surgeries for the people that had insurance to make up for the lost money on the gsw people.

 

[Dumpstick]

Thats interesting
So why would they build an ER without a hospital? St Anthony did that in Mustang.

If one has an ER, but no Hospital, then one has no hospital bed in which to admit the non-paying customer.

The only required duty of the ER is to stabilize the patient. If there are no bed into which to admit the patient, then once he is stabilized he has to go.

The ER loses the money on the initial treatment, but is not stuck with the bill for potentially weeks of expensive treatment, plus rehab.

We will see more of this, hospitals with no ER, and standalone ERs. It's simply a defensive measure to avoid truly staggering loses.

 

[tRidiot]

If one has an ER, but no Hospital, then one has no hospital bed in which to admit the non-paying customer.

The only required duty of the ER is to stabilize the patient. If there are no bed into which to admit the patient, then once he is stabilized he has to go.

The ER loses the money on the initial treatment, but is not stuck with the bill for potentially weeks of expensive treatment, plus rehab.

We will see more of this, hospitals with no ER, and standalone ERs. It's simply a defensive measure to avoid truly staggering loses.

Standalone ERs are extremely commonplace in TX where they are financially feasible. They are as common as an Urgent Care here in some areas. They stabilize and then arrange transfer to a local hospital for admission. Something about the laws in Oklahoma and reimbursement makes them almost non-existent here. I looked into it once upon a time for some reason or other and found out it what it was, but I don't really remember.

 

[BobbyV]

Why the full impact later this year? I thought the economy would be picking up and folks getting back to work.

If it's like many of our facilities they might have a coding or billing backlog.

It'll catch up eventually and the backlog disappears.


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