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> Increasingly, the staff of the ED who have always upheld the proud notion of being the one place where the doors are always open to anyone who needs care at a
by kixiQu 4y ago
> Increasingly, the staff of the ED who have always upheld the proud notion of being the one place where the doors are always open to anyone who needs care at any time, have felt besieged.
Yeah, okay.
At another nearby "nonprofit" local hospital, not atypically:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/podcasts/the-daily/nonprofit-hospitals-investigation.html?showTranscript=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/podcasts/the-daily/nonpro...)
> The centerpiece of this program were a series of scripts, like theatrical scripts, that outlined in this play exactly how employees should try to get money from patients, even those who are supposed to receive free care. And these documents were distributed to anyone at the hospital who might interact with patients and talk to them about payment.
> So in one training document, for example, the employees were told, do not accept the first no. And then staff are led through a series of questions to ask patients. The first was, how would you like to pay that today? If that question didn’t work, employees were told to ask for half the balance. If that didn’t work, staff could offer to set up a payment plan, like the kind that Alexandra went on. And what’s critically missing from this collection program is any way of screening patients to determine whether they should qualify for free care.
- MR_Bulldops 4y ago> Yeah, okay. What's with the attitude? Do you think it's ED staff that created those training documents? Do you think ER physicians who spent years jumping through hoops to get accepted into medical school, then spent 4 years in medical school followed by 4 years working 100 hour weeks for minimum wage as a resident do all of that so they can gouge patients for money? Do you think RNs who jump through years of hoops and school, who sign up to help people during the worst times of those people's lives get off by upselling them on treatment? There is a massive amount of misplaced vitriol toward medical providers that should instead go towards hospital admins and their profiteering ways.
- kixiQu 4y agoWhy should it matter whether they feel bad about it, whether they "get off by" it? The reporting here is very clear: the possibly-illegal profit-seeking of purportedly nonprofit health care facilities isn't something "hospital admins" do on their own, it's something that those patient-facing staff are out there consciously enacting every single day. And anyone there could have decided they find that unacceptable and moved to work for other institutions. Definitionally, the ones still there did not. Everybody is complicit. And I say this as someone who is conflicted about my own job, who has all sympathy for individuals trying to figure out their own moral responsibility in shitty situations, so I'm not directing vitriol as those workers at all – that is, when they're not publishing op-eds framing their workplace as the last bulwark of social ethics where they help the helpless and do what others won't and people should be looking to them for guidance and don't ask about how many patients they send to collections please and thank you.