Editor’s note: This commentary is by Vicki Harrison, MSN, of Barnard, retired from 45 years in social work and community health nursing, with a subspecialty in mental health and substance abuse.
Reading about the nonprofit Bennington hospital system buying a neighboring property for $3.2 million, reinforces the lost path of U.S. health care. Hospitals are not real estate nonprofits. Hospitals are mandated to provide health care and receive substantial tax breaks for doing this. Sixty percent of Vermonters cannot utilize their health care, but a local hospital can spend $3.2 million of our health care dollars on real estate.
This is not a comment on the value of this property to the Bennington community. My husband graduated from the former college there and worked there a few years back, when we were in the area. It is about the use of health care dollars and the population’s acceptance of the use of these health care dollars to buy real estate. This is not acceptable while U.S. health care remains unreachable for the many. This never was acceptable in the past. Only since business has taken over health care has this become a proposed “new norm.” Did you know it costs $2,000 for a root canal at this hospital’s dental clinic? Health care is not a business in other countries that provide health care to all citizens.
OneCare Vermont, the state’s accountable care organization, continues to tout itself as the preventer of more expensive health care costs, which will diminish health care costs sometime in the distant future. When? When 70%-80% of the people can no longer afford to use their health care? Prevention of disease and further progression of disease is an admirable goal. Physicians and researchers spent much time and U.S. tax monies (your money!) developing preventive procedures. Unfortunately, the hedge fund investors who are buying physician practices, unstopped by any appropriate regulation, will also be making a percentage off your colonoscopy, your diabetic drug, your routine testing. It is not merely a 2% markup but often 200% markup to gain the almighty U.S. profit. Once private usurpers of this public good have taken hold, it takes some real mojo to get them out.
When you are next asked if you want an airflight to better your survival advantage to another facility, you should think again. Medical airflights used to be volunteer operations. This is another area hedge fund investors discovered in the past decade. The investors would only invest, if the private flight company agreed that they would charge absurd rates and be willing to take the patient’s house, savings, bankrupt them, whatever was necessary to gain the steep and unpredictable reimbursement. Do you think when you are so ill, you have been advised to be airflighted, you will be strong enough to make these inquiries? These folks are counting on your vulnerability to financially exploit you.
These are the problems with U.S. health care and no one will consistently speak or write of them. We have to hear information 7-10 times to begin to believe it. I read medical updates daily. I wish you could. It would sicken and dishearten you, if you knew where U.S. health care has arrived, and the path it could have been on. That path was disturbed in the 1990s, when MDs asked MBAs to come in and game the system. These MBAs packed the hospitals over the past few decades with workers. These same hospital administrators are against the public option, where profit will be removed from U.S. health care at every turn, and plan to continue this tack. Steven Ricchetti, newly hired by President-elect Joe Biden, has been a lobbyist for hospitals and pharmacy, and has Biden’s full trust. He argues that so many folks are now employed in U.S. health care, that this system should not be deconstructed.
However, just as the MBAs built up this health care system in the past decades, the system can be deconstructed to the folk who provide health care with a clerk per unit and one administrator, whose pay is tied to a percentage of clinician’s pay. The current system is inaccessible for 60% of Americans to receive health care, driving nurses out of the profession and beginning to affect even MDs, newly being fired by these ambitious highly paid administrators. Clearly, a U.S. jobs program would have to occur simultaneously so these irrelevant folks to the practice of health, can have work. But, this can be achieved, if we want health care for all Americans.
