Financial safe synonym8/7/2023 ![]() ![]() “Uninsured patients often are dealing with a lot of delayed diagnoses and care. “When safety-net hospitals close, a lot of the patients that are most hurt are the uninsured, because that’s what the safety net is really meant to catch,” Chatterjee said. ![]() She points to Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital, which shuttered in 2019. Paula Chatterjee, an assistant professor of general internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said not having a common definition leads to financial instability, which in turn can lead to hospital closures. What’s the danger of not having a universal definition? Does it impact patients? He also cited care that’s expensive but not profitable: emergency trauma, burn and psychiatric care. “That’s why we are less likely to see for-profit safety-net hospitals.”īruce Siegel, president and CEO of America’s Essential Hospitals, prefers the term “essential” to “safety net.” “It’s important for people to understand that these hospitals do things that no one else does,” he said, such as community-health programs that target food insecurity and homelessness. “For-profits are less likely to be located in a less financially advantaged area,” she said. But Ge Bai, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins’ schools of public health and business, said for-profits’ choice of neighborhoods usually reflects their patient base. As a result, these hospitals usually have high numbers of uninsured and Medicaid patients whose treatment costs aren’t fully covered, which in turn means safety-net hospitals typically depend on public funding and operate on thin profit margins.įor-profit hospitals can also provide safety-net services and receive public funding. In practice, that means they won’t turn away patients who can’t pay. Almost all have a stated mission or mandate of serving a low-income population, regardless of patients’ insurance coverage, ability to pay or immigration status. They can be rural or urban, public (like a county hospital) or nonprofit (like a university hospital). Lots of hospitals consider themselves safety nets, but there’s no one definition. Why the differences? And what do they mean for the low-income populations who tend to rely on these facilities? To begin to understand what qualifies as a safety net and how the lack of a common definition could impact patient care, FRONTLINE spoke to experts in public health, medicine and hospital administration. Other definitions put the number much higher. ![]() ![]() America’s Essential Hospitals, a trade group composed primarily of urban facilities with high levels of Medicaid and uninsured patients, counts 300 members. Safety-net hospitals face a number of longstanding challenges thrown into the spotlight by COVID-19, from competition with wealthier hospitals to uneven government support.īut another challenge is even more basic: No universal definition of a safety-net hospital exists.īecause there’s no single definition for these institutions - the subject of The Healthcare Divide, a joint investigation between FRONTLINE and NPR premiering May 18 on PBS - the number of U.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |