The coming hospital crisis
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It's not clear to me how policy relates to hospitals doing no business. I assume hospitals are considered essential and not covered by the lock down policies. Heck, even the place I work for isn't covered and we're hardly front line health care workers. So why are hospitals all but shut down these days?
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@Rainman said in The coming hospital crisis:
So if hospitals are going broke, health insurance companies are booming, right?
The biggest part of heath insurance is simply claims management for ‘self-insured’ corporations. In other words, when IBM contracts (say) United Heathcare to provide health insurance to its employees, UHC administers claims but bills the underlying healthcare directly directly to IBM, along with their own administration fees.
So they might even be losing money, depending on how their contracts work.
It’s different in the individual and small group market, those act more like traditional insurance. But they are also dealing with fewer people able to pay claims so who knows how that’s netting out for them.
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@Horace said in The coming hospital crisis:
It's not clear to me how policy relates to hospitals doing no business. I assume hospitals are considered essential and not covered by the lock down policies. Heck, even the place I work for isn't covered and we're hardly front line health care workers. So why are hospitals all but shut down these days?
They’re not shut down, they’re restricted in which services they can provide. The ‘no elective procedures’ is policy based and I believe is primarily due to a shortage of PPE.
But surely, like everything else, policy is only part of the story. Most people didn’t need to be told in April that bringing grandma to a busy urban hospital for cataracts wasn’t a good idea.
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@jon-nyc said in The coming hospital crisis:
Understandable, but only implementable if they don’t mind proceeding as normal but with no PPE.
But maybe next time countries will have a strategic reserve of PPE and won’t have to. One would hope, right?
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@jon-nyc said in The coming hospital crisis:
Usually the conversation is about policy. I think that Covid Doves in general have yet to concede the point that policy isn’t the problem, the fucking virus is.
I'm happy to not concede your notion that regardless of what our social response is, the effect of the response is the effect of the virus. I really don't think that's a reasonable notion.
