It's cute, but I don't wanna pay for it.
Aug. 7th, 2009 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogWe got a postcard yesterday from one of the fine local companies leading the fight against any change to our Finest Health Care In The World If You Can Afford It™. It's not about that, though.... or is it?
(Sorry about the purple stuff; LJ's not uploading pictures at the moment and I ran this through my FB wall.)
It's nice having a big, new, freshly-renovated and expanded emergency room three miles from my house. But did we really need this health-care corporation mailbombing the entire neighborhood with postcards to announce it? With a William Wegman-quality photo to boot?
This Kaleida outfit has been especially aggressive in protecting its turf from all who threaten the hundreds of millions of our dollars that they gross off it. That is not an exaggeration. Due to a billing error, I got to see what the Great Dane Dere got paid for fixing up Eleanor's uterus back in April. All of those doctors and nurses and residents oh my! are rather expensive, it seems: $6,000-plus for an hour, at most, of O.R. time. Figure, conservatively, that this chain has four O.R.s in each hospital, running 18 hours a day, 350 days a year, and is doing it at all five of its fine Western New York locations. That's $756,000,000, maff fans- three quarters of a billion. With a B. And that's just the O.R.'s.
In addition to theirs- Suburban, Buffalo General, Churlins, the original Millard on Gates and DeGraff- there's also ECMC, which is supposed to be merged with them by now but isn't as they've spent hundreds of thousands of legal fees to fight merger with a non-profit hospital; and there's a coterie of Catholic hospitals, most within a short drive of one of the Kaleidas, if not of each other. They're just as aggressive about advertising, particularly where some reasonable management of local medical care would cut into their cash flow. This city, like much of this state, is overprovided for in terms of hospital facilities; all of the ones I just mentioned, except Suburban, have been here for decades longer than even I've been alive, and served a population that was once the eighth largest in the country. A few years ago, the state said, you don't need that many anymore and we're going to close some of them. Hissies got pitched. In Cheektowaga, home of St. Joseph's Hospital- known to the locals as "Sloppy Joes"- the administrators and legislators all whined and bitched and, through some legal maneuvering, Sloppy Joes is still costing every penny it did two years ago when we had way more public money than we do now.
Kaleida, though, is determined to keep all those cash cows happily mooing. The state also decreed that two of its five hospitals- Gates and DeGraff- be closed by now, or at least converted to something other than full-service hospital facilities. Their reaction has been to advertise the living shit out of them, in the hopes that it will gin up some non-existent demand, which will come from, who else?, one of their competitors. They even have a billboard saying "Heart attack or stroke? Call 911 and get to Gates." A lovely idea, except they put it on the shoulder of the 90 on Seneca Nation territory (the only place on the Thruway where you can billboard-bomb the drivers from so close) on the outbound side about 10 miles out of Fredonia. If, God forbid, somebody coded in one of those cars and took Kaleida's advice? The only place they'd be getting-to once they got back the 50 miles to Buffalo would be Amigone Funeral Home.
So all'yall who keep saying that a "public option will put the private competition out of business because they have such deep pockets" and all that horseshit? Trust me. These guys have money to burn. Only in a reformed system, it won't be burned on billboards and cute postcards.
(Sorry about the purple stuff; LJ's not uploading pictures at the moment and I ran this through my FB wall.)
It's nice having a big, new, freshly-renovated and expanded emergency room three miles from my house. But did we really need this health-care corporation mailbombing the entire neighborhood with postcards to announce it? With a William Wegman-quality photo to boot?
This Kaleida outfit has been especially aggressive in protecting its turf from all who threaten the hundreds of millions of our dollars that they gross off it. That is not an exaggeration. Due to a billing error, I got to see what the Great Dane Dere got paid for fixing up Eleanor's uterus back in April. All of those doctors and nurses and residents oh my! are rather expensive, it seems: $6,000-plus for an hour, at most, of O.R. time. Figure, conservatively, that this chain has four O.R.s in each hospital, running 18 hours a day, 350 days a year, and is doing it at all five of its fine Western New York locations. That's $756,000,000, maff fans- three quarters of a billion. With a B. And that's just the O.R.'s.
In addition to theirs- Suburban, Buffalo General, Churlins, the original Millard on Gates and DeGraff- there's also ECMC, which is supposed to be merged with them by now but isn't as they've spent hundreds of thousands of legal fees to fight merger with a non-profit hospital; and there's a coterie of Catholic hospitals, most within a short drive of one of the Kaleidas, if not of each other. They're just as aggressive about advertising, particularly where some reasonable management of local medical care would cut into their cash flow. This city, like much of this state, is overprovided for in terms of hospital facilities; all of the ones I just mentioned, except Suburban, have been here for decades longer than even I've been alive, and served a population that was once the eighth largest in the country. A few years ago, the state said, you don't need that many anymore and we're going to close some of them. Hissies got pitched. In Cheektowaga, home of St. Joseph's Hospital- known to the locals as "Sloppy Joes"- the administrators and legislators all whined and bitched and, through some legal maneuvering, Sloppy Joes is still costing every penny it did two years ago when we had way more public money than we do now.
Kaleida, though, is determined to keep all those cash cows happily mooing. The state also decreed that two of its five hospitals- Gates and DeGraff- be closed by now, or at least converted to something other than full-service hospital facilities. Their reaction has been to advertise the living shit out of them, in the hopes that it will gin up some non-existent demand, which will come from, who else?, one of their competitors. They even have a billboard saying "Heart attack or stroke? Call 911 and get to Gates." A lovely idea, except they put it on the shoulder of the 90 on Seneca Nation territory (the only place on the Thruway where you can billboard-bomb the drivers from so close) on the outbound side about 10 miles out of Fredonia. If, God forbid, somebody coded in one of those cars and took Kaleida's advice? The only place they'd be getting-to once they got back the 50 miles to Buffalo would be Amigone Funeral Home.
So all'yall who keep saying that a "public option will put the private competition out of business because they have such deep pockets" and all that horseshit? Trust me. These guys have money to burn. Only in a reformed system, it won't be burned on billboards and cute postcards.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-07 02:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-07 02:12 pm (UTC)Wait till you see these robotic O.R. assistants they came up with. They took the name Kaleida, shortened it to Kaled, and then made this cute anagram....
no subject
Date: 2009-08-07 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-09 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-09 10:38 pm (UTC)I speak from my experience with the changes in my career to bankruptcy law. After the last major change to the Bankruptcy Code before the 2005 major rejiggering, Congress appointed such a commission to recommend changes to the statute. A panel of professors, judges and practitioners worked for years on some reasonable tweakings to the system and proposed a series of recommendations, much as a similar commission had essentially created the current law from almost-scratch in the late 70s. That wasn't good enough for the credit card companies, car lenders and other playahs in the BK realm. They ignored the recommendations, wrote their own bill, section by section, and stuffed legislators' re-election campaigns with cash to ensure they got what they paid for. The resulting bill was (and unfortunately still is) one of the biggest clusterfucks you will ever see in your life.