American Healthcare

While in Leola this weekend I read that the Lancaster General Hospital, a community based non-profit general hospital reported that they have been impacted by the downturn in the economy. They reported that they had a significant decrease in net income surplus over the last year. Their surplus was $113 million, down from the record $136 million of the prior year.

The administration of the hospital were pleased to note that they had not laid anyone off over the last year….I better hope not given their solid surplus and that the hospital is a non-profit organization. They noted that their income declined because they had an increase in the number of people without insurance. The administration did note that the number of uninsured puts pressure on increasing charges for those who have insurance….that makes sense and is a given. Though the article did not say, non-profit hospitals have more patients without insurance because from what I understand for profit hospitals turn away uninsured non-life threatening cases and have the uninsured go to their local non-profit hospital. One can therefore imagine what the surplus would be like for the for-profit hospital. That all said, a $113 million surplus at the end of the year is still very respectable.

Here is another interesting tidbit I found interesting in the article. There were about 100,000 emergency room visits. Of those visits, about 14,000 or 14% had no insurance, which is a significant number. This 14% does not include those who are underinsured who have large gaps in their insurance coverage. Over the last decade, medical bills are the number one cause for people filing for bankruptcy in America. While it is unlike to remain true with the housing decline and subprime loan mess paying medical treatment will no doubt remain at least number two reason after mortgage defaulting.

The same hospital reports about 23,000 or 23% of those visiting the emergency room had Medicare. About 26,000 or 26% had Medicaid. In other words, about 49% of those visiting the emergency room were on some sort of government based medical plan. Add the 14% without insurance means that about 37-38% of ER patients at the hospital in question relay solely upon private insurance. This helps puts a national plan government based plan into a different perspective.