Will $80 million make Frist care about the uninsured?......

[ElsewheresDaughter]

NY Times writer Dan Gross notes that the stock of hospital conglomerate HCA took a giant hit yesterday. Why? It reported that its earnings would disappoint because of an unexpected rise in uninsured patients it treated. Why is this important? Becaue HCA was founded by Sen. Bill Frist's family, which still owns about 17 million shares of the company. Here's the question: will Frist now show some interest in expanding health insurance coverage and preventing cuts to Medicaid now that his family is $80 million poorer?

[sinkingfeeling]

1. My guess, is NO. He will hate them even more for sucking $$$$

out of his estate, which he wants to pass tax-free to his kids.

[rainbow4321]

2. As an HCA employee,...

I can tell you that HCA makes up for the uninsured thru the Medicare and insured patients that they keep in the hospital FOREVER..weeks, months..test after test, procedure after procedure..the hospital charges $60 for a respiratory therapist to go into a pt's room and stick a little portable oxygen meter on their finger for 30 seconds---keep in mind, on our floor we have the "oxygen level reader" (pulse ox, we call it) right at the bedside and a nurse uses one each time she/he take someone's vital signs. Yet the hospital still has the RT go in their and the pt gets charged the $60. Their portable pulse ox costs $500 so it was paid for looongggg ago!
HCA skimps on nursing staff to save $$, seems to go for the lowest bidder in supplies, puts pts in more expensive monitered/telemetry (cardiac) beds when they could really go downstairs to a cheaper, medical-surgical bed. We've had sooo many be admitted with a "near syncope" diagnosis...layman's terms literally means "almost dizzy". What follows is days worth of test/procedures/**multiple** doctor consults. You so much as sneeze and you're admitted with a full work up.

They have made people wait down in our ER for 12-14 hrs when we are full instead of diverting them to near by hospitals (which is the norm for facilities--they put ambulances on "divert")---just so they don't have to give away any $$ to other hospitals. There have been several non-HCA facilities in our county built over the past 3 years with more breaking ground, so HCA's piece of the pie is getting smaller and smaller---and nurses are fleeing to these other places, also.

I'll have to keep my ears open to see what the **real** reason is for the supposed slump. They need to find another "excuse" cuz the company sure as hell is not hurting money wise!

---------------

Some analysts question HCA's bad debt claims, say sell stock; others say buy

http://www.businessword.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1107/

A few securities analysts think HCA’s earnings problems are deeper than its problems with a growing number of uninsured patients and patients who don’t pay their co-pays, and they are giving the company’s stock a sell rating. Other analysts say rising employment will solve these problems and they give the stock a buy rating. This stockscharts.com chart shows HCA is trading below its 200-day moving average and money is moving out of the stock. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Some on Wall Street are growing skeptical of the claim that swelling numbers of uninsured patients are coming into the nation’s largest hospital chain and driving up its bad-debt expense. Neither are they convinced that the problem will go away as the economy improves.

“I think there is more to the story,” says Maryanne Hennessey, an analyst at Criterion Research Group LLC in New York. The independent research company warned of rising bad debt back in October. “Most of the growth in revenues over the past three quarters looks to come from price increases, and in particular increases for the uninsured,” Ms. Hennessey says. “We don’t think that is sustainable.” She calculates that the uninsured are being charged an average of $25,000 per admission compared with $9,000 for patients with insurance. Ms. Hennessey is recommending investors “sell” HCA stock.

[area51]

3. "Will $80 million make Frist care about the uninsured?"

Hell, no; he's a nazi. Nazis don't care about anyone but themselves.