Hospital closings feared

Health care in Massachusetts is in a crisis, leaders of the Massachusetts Hospital Association said Tuesday, issuing an urgent call for leadership and action to solve the problem and warning that more hospitals will close if budget problems are not resolved soon.

Currently, 600,000 Massachusetts residents – more than the whole population of Boston – go without health care, according a study released Tuesday by the association. Within the last two years, the number of people lacking insurance has grown by 150,000. Speakers at the conference blamed the Romney administration’s budget cuts for the problem, saying that hospitals will not be able to continue to treat the increasing number of uninsured.

“We want to say loudly and clearly that hospitals can’t bear the burden of the uninsured,” said Jeanette Clough, chief executive officer of Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.

In the past 20 years, more than one-third of Massachusetts hospitals have closed. Rep. Peter Koutoujian (D-Waltham), co-chairman of the Health Care Committee, warned that if the 2005 budget allocation for health care is not increased, even more will close their doors.

John McDonough, executive director of Health Care for All, said it is unacceptable that 11,000 children in the state are on the waiting list to receive health insurance, especially because state money that has been appropriated for health care is being used in other places.

“There is money in the system from the federal government to fund health care, but it is being used for other purposes, like to fill the deficit,” McDonough said.

In the past year, the state’s hospitals have reported a 29 percent increase in uncompensated costs, according to the MHA study. They also said Romney’s 2005 funding proposal provides even less funding than in 2004 and would leave a shortfall of $340 million.

Bob Norton, president of the North Shore Medical Center in Salem said the center lost $20 million last year alone as a result of treating the uninsured. Treating patients with Medicaid also causes the hospital to lose money; it only received a reimbursement of 68 cents for every dollar spent on care in the last fiscal year, he said.

“This underpayment is now affecting our ability to provide,” he said.

Norton also warned that the problem is a threat to the health care of everyone in the state because as the number of uninsured residents increases, emergency room waiting periods and insurance premiums will increase as well.

Health care cuts also stretch emergency rooms to their limits because the uninsured often go to hospitals when their problems become too acute to forego treatment, said Dr. Mark Pearlmutter, chief of emergency medicine at Caritas Christi Health Care System.

“We see longer waits for all patients when more and more of our patients are so ill they require admission,” he said. “We cannot sustain this.”

Pearlmutter said he is seeing a growing number of patients with serious health problems attempt to treat themselves and end up in the emergency room with serious complications after their attempts fail. The complications could have been prevented had they been given the standard medication and therapy they would have received from a primary care physician, he said.

But according to MHA Chairman Thomas Porter, there is still hope.

“These are solvable, fixable problems,” he said. “Fundamentally, it comes down to one word – leadership.”