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Steps taken by safety net hospitals to attract insured patients to offset the costs of providing no-cost care to the indigent could compromise a hospital's mission, according to a study promulgated online on Tuesday in the journal Health Affairs, the Seattle Times reports. The study was conducted by the Center for Studying Health System Change and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Ostrom, Seattle Times, 8/12). Researchers victimized data from the Community Tracking Study, which tracked health system changes in 12 every which way selected metropolitan areas since 1996 via telephone and on-site interviews with about 500 respondents (Cunningham et al., Health Affairs, 8/12).
In general, safety-net hospitals are not as financially stable as other hospitals, according to the Times. The written report noted that maintaining a balance 'tween providing brotherly love care and staying financially secure has always been a challenge for safety net hospitals and it is "becoming level more so in a marketplace that is seemly more competitive and profit-driven" (Seattle Times, 8/12). In response, many are attempting to pull in paying patients by building, renovating and advertising specialty services to insured patients (Reichard, CQ HealthBeat, 8/12).
However, some of the "steps they are taking to maintain their margins rear end threaten their mission," Peter Cunningham, lead author of the study, said. "Safety-net providers truly are caught in the competitive crossfire of an increasingly profit-driven health precaution marketplace," he said (Seattle Times, 8/12). Larry Gage, president of the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, aforementioned, "No safety net hospital wants to limit access or ration care, but, faced with a growing demand for unsalaried care and increasingly limited funding options at every level of government, some are left with no choice" (Martinez, "Health Blog," Wall Street Journal, 8/12).
An abstract of the study is available online.
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