Friday, 3 November 2006
Hospitals Begin Offering Free Basic Care
The New York Times reported last week about a new trend starting to emerge at hospitals: free basic care for uninsured patients.
Hospitals lose millions of dollars a year providing care for people who can’t pay for it. Typically, they’ve attempted to make this money by increasing costs to insured patients and by claiming losses at tax-time.
The new approach has the hospitals providing free basic care — the kind of care uninsured people usually go without. By giving people access to routine care, they hope to prevent the kind of serious health issues that uninsured patients often have when they show up at the hospital.
This routine care is often too expensive for uninsured people to pay out of their own pockets. But from the point of view of a hospital budget, this care is low-cost and easy to provide. “For most preventive efforts there is an upfront expense,” said Alan D. Aviles, president of Health and Hospitals Corporation in New York. “But over the long term it saves money.”
Officials working for Denver, Colorado’s public hospital system estimate that for every $1 spent on prenatal care for uninsured women, they save $7 in care for newborns and children.
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