The Well Is Running Dry
It is becoming more and more apparent that Ken Smithmier's strategies are backfiring and that his empire is crumbling. DMH's census is down 40% since Ken kicked Prairie out of his hospital. His heart cath lab is missing a bunch of employees who followed Prairie to St. Mary's. And, those God-awful tax bills will soon start rolling in. He's significantly increased his overhead by renting even more property and buying more billboards and city bus advertising. Much lower revenue + kicking out Prairie's patient base + spending more and more money = disaster on the horizon. (There's no European Union to bail you out, Ken.)
What does all this mean? Maybe Ken won't be able to pay himself $1.5 MILLION this next fiscal year. Even more important, the doctors who he's been grossly over-paying may see their paychecks shrink to less than half of what they were making...perhaps just enough less that they might be more willing to talk to the Feds about what they know. Perhaps just enough so that a full audit of DMH's books might reveal some interesting discrepancies. Perhaps just enough to prove to those who know how the books were cooked that they'd better talk with the DOJ now rather than be in prison later.
You can't work in a hospital that's not allowed to bill Medicare, people. Wise up, come clean, and end the charade now.
posted by Watcher2300 at 11/04/2011 08:12:00 PM
7 Comments:
It is a Top 50 Cardiac Hospital now too!
If I'm not mistaken this 40% drop is only referring to inpatients. Another thing to look into is how outpatient services have been affected. Things like outpatient surgery, sleep lab, eeg have got to have taken a big hit in patient volume. The inability to see Medicare patients could be the straw that breaks this camel's back.
Let's see how that Top 50 ranking holds up now that they've booted Prairie. If DMH didn't monkey with their numbers, which wouldn't surprise me, they surely relied on the outcomes from the Prairie docs who are no longer there.
As long as certain people are associated with DMH- it will continue to slide backwards.
we are hERe. does DMH really want you to come to the ER for care? Is this ad campaign in preparation for St Mary's opening a new ER? Of course not- this is a way to get people in the door that don't have family doctors alot of the time. This gets a new patient in the system that can be shunted to a DMH owned lackey physician or referred to the nearly nonexistent heart center since prarie left. Think about it.
More people left DMH. Couple of directors and some hospitalits. More directors would like to leave but signed noncompete clauses and would have to go out of town for a few years before they could come back.
When patients become profit centers, all our health is at risk.
First, for those who are lucky enough to have private insurance, we are at the mercy of claims adjusters and benefit managers whose prime objective is to minimize health insurance company payouts for care. On top of that, until health care reform is fully implemented, you can still be denied health insurance for pre-existing conditions or pay exorbitant premiums, leaving many people who might hurt the profits of health insurance companies left to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each for uninsured care.
In short, the corporate goal of health insurers is not the medical well-being of policy holders; it is profitability - as pointed out many times on BuzzFlash at Truthout. Illness and treatment reduce profitability. Why spend money on an expensive procedure for a cancer patient if they are going to die anyway?
This is the de facto death panel that exists in a world of privatized health insurance.
But a recent commentary by Philip Caper posted on Truthout poses the other side of the double threat to our health care in the current health insurance climate. The providers of medical care are increasingly employees of corporations that are out to maximize profits - along with Big Pharma that produces our medications:
Large corporations, many of them for-profit and publicly traded now dominate the financing and delivery of American medical care ... pharmaceutical companies have become huge marketing machines. They now are focused far more on their profitability than on their healing mission. Producing medicine that cures diseases instead of just treating symptoms has become a bad business model. Once a disease is cured the customer disappears and profits decline....
[Meanwhile,] the culture and vocabulary of health care underwent a remarkable change. Where hospital directors used to be called "administrators," they became CEOs. What used to be called "hospital services" became "product lines." Those who used to be called "patients" became "market share." Advertising by doctors and hospitals, once considered unethical, became commonly accepted.
Caper concludes: "In today's corporate health care industry, physician 'productivity' is often measured not by patient health but by profit."
So, it's not surprising that politicians such as Rick Scott and Rick Santorum, who are apostles of "free market" health care, have both benefited financially from such a system. Scott, the governor of Florida, was CEO of the for-profit Columbia/HCA chain when it committed the most massive Medicare fraud scheme uncovered as of that time. Santorum became a millionaire, in part, after being defeated for re-election as senator and "joining" the board of Universal Health Services.
If you value your life, do you want all the medical decisions about your care made by corporate hospital chains and care providers, Big Pharma and private insurance companies?
That's risky business when it comes to health.
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