Thanks for the response!
Alright, so first, the insurance agencies mentioned in the article are lowering their premiums to better match premiums already charged by other insurers. This is not a case of one insurer suddenly strong arming hospitals in accepting payments equal to what another insurer is already paying. This is one insurer having to deal with excess administrative costs, salaries, etc. in order to compete with another insurer.
Second, I'm having trouble finding Ochsner's 2012 annual report online, but over the 2011 fiscal year, they took in $36 million more in revenue than they accumulated in expenses:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=...ent/misc_files/Ochsner_2011_Annual_Report.pdf
I'd love to see a comprehensive breakdown of their 2012 financials, so I'll keep looking around for those.
To address the issue of costs, not *all* hospital systems are willing or able to charge unjustifiably high prices for care, and prices can vary wildly between hospitals that are very near to each other, let alone further apart (more on that in a bit), and it is healthcare pricing in aggregate that effects what insurers charge, and how much patients pay out of pocket (with those uninsured being charged by far the highest rates, leading to unexpected medical expenses being
the cause of over 60% of bankruptcies in America each year). It could very well be that the Ochsner system is charging reasonable prices for care, thus causing it to struggle in maintaining a consistent positive net income, while other hospitals are the source of high costs of care and are not struggling in a similar manner, and there's ample evidence to back up the idea that he latter is the case for many hospitals.
Further, it's not the nurses that make out like bandits when hospitals may decide to overcharge, but higher level staff will let nurses, etc. take the blow when expenses increase or revenues drop. For example, Kaiser Health News did a study on various children's hospitals throughout the country in 2011, and
CEO compensation ranged from $1.5 million to $6 million depending on the hospital, and that's just the CEOs, thus it doesn't include the compensation for numerous other high level executives. In Oregon, it's been reported that hospital CEO pay has been
growing at double the rate of the average worker within the state, and we're seeing similar trends elsewhere. These compensation packages are counted as part of a business' expenses, and thus contribute to any losses a business may face. When times are tough, these compensation packages don't drop, and often tough times are used as a justification for CEO compensation to increase, in correlation with a perceived increase in difficulty in running the company. In fact, to use an example from another industry,
this is exactly what happened with Viacom's CEO in 2010, when his pay jumped from $50.5 million a year to $84.5 million, though he took pay cuts in
2011 and
2012 as a result of the significant PR backlash over the company's executive compensation in light of the (at the time) recent financial collapse and the company's significant layoffs in
2008,
2009, and
2011. Similar events happen in many, many industries.
It would appear to me that you and your co-workers are being caught in the crossfire that is occurring between the for-profit healthcare and insurance industries and the government's attempt to curb the unsustainable growth in the costs of care, though I'm not privy to the information necessary to say that with any certainty. I can't really say much other than it's disappointing and it saddens me that you seem to be undeservedly bearing some of the burdens associated with this transition.
Now, to finish this off by returning to my point about the incredible disparity in the price tags of care from hospital to hospital, here's the Huffington Post article
Hospital Prices No Longer Secret As New Data Reveals Bewildering System, Staggering Cost Differences:
*insert article here*
