st. vincent's hospital to close
Posted by howard in nyc in bad economy, bad health care
a friend emailed me an article about the financial failure of this hospital. being reported as if it was news. it prompted this reply from me:
the closure of st. vincent's is, according to two insiders i've spoken to this week, a done deal. they are losing $3-5 million a month; that is after millions of state and federal subsidies as well as medicare and medicaid payments.
even patients with medicare/medicaid create significant dollar losses. the salaries of the people delivering care to those patients is not met by the payments from medicare/medicaid. and they have a huge percentage of patients with no insurance whatsoever.
otoh, society has come to expect free, readily available hospital care as a right. and if the halls aren't brightly lit or clean enough, those with insurance will just go uptown to another hospital, expecting the local hospital to meet the needs of their neighbors w/o insurance.
complete clusterfuck of an economic/payment structure in this industry sector. and the so-called health care reform from this president not only ignores the flawed structure, but first and foremost preserves the place of those who benefit the most from the flawed structure (pharmaceuticals and insurance companies).
and as the system cracks and pieces fail, people immediately fall back on sentimental notions from a nostalgic past that never existed, or was never sustainable.
such sentiment will not slow the cracks and the failures.
the catholic diocese of new york is nearly out of the acute patient care business in new york city. the last two hospitals they closed, st. joseph's and mary immaculata, both in queens, they just walked away from. shut the doors, auctioned off the equipment and the buildings. (i bought some of the equipment). eight hospitals down to zero, in the space of eleven years. the church at least recouped some cash on the real estate value (and will on that greenwich village property that won't be transferred to continuum).
in past times, the state of new york would throw tens of millions of tax dollars at this financial train wreck, to feed public outcry based on sentiment and entitlement expectations of free, unrationed health care. but today, the state is broke (and is blessed to have a governor who refuses to deny that harsh reality, even though no one will listen to him). and there is no money to throw down the drain. nor is there any tolerance for higher taxes (also blessedly).
the people and the political leaders are too child-like to rationally face the realities of the failed health care structure. the realities will assert themselves nonetheless. delayed, but not denied.
