Lou Meyers: An empty gesture
Regarding the April 16 news article “Hospitals: We’ll fight bill to open market”: State Sen. Tom Apodaca’s proposed bill to roll back the state’s certificate-of-need laws, without expanding Medicaid, is another empty gesture devoted to political posturing while real-life collateral damage mounts.
These restrictions, now in place, were designed to help offset losses to hospitals burdened with the responsibilities of providing uncompensated care. By dampening the competition, which has the luxury of picking and choosing patients, siphoning precious financial and human resources from mandated caregivers is tempered.
With Apodaca and his fellow Republican cohorts in the General Assembly stubbornly refusing to accept billions in federal Medicaid funding dollars, the powerful hospital lobby will retain this compelling counter-argument, thus this half measure goes nowhere.
Meanwhile, competition remains stifled while hospitals and their affiliates continue to sock it to a captive audience of health insurance policyholders to cover the medical costs of others, too poor for premium subsidies, showing up in emergency rooms, unable to pay. Do fabricated facility fees and supercharged outpatient billing, subject to ever increasing deductibles, ring a bell?
Lou Meyers
Durham
This story was originally published April 22, 2015 at 5:20 PM with the headline "Lou Meyers: An empty gesture."