re: Mark Cuban is fed up with rural and urban hospitals crying poor/claiming insolvency

33% of Louisiana is on Medicaid. Pathetic

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He’s not wrong. Most of these hospitals are run by RNs with MBAs from shite schools. They answer to boards of community members that at best are ignorant or at worse getting soft kickbacks from the county hospital.

The administrators at these hospitals will burn money to stay in control and keep their loyalists in power.

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Half of the CFOs in these shithole small town hospitals started as the patient registration receptionist and somehow 15 years later they’re an executive. You see things in these hospitals that don’t make sense to anyone outside of their bubble.

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So hospitals are only viable when taxpayer dollars are streaming in?

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The money has to come from somewhere.

Someone mentioned illegals which is a subset of free care cohort. They take up a lot of time and resources (translators, multiple systematic health issues, etc) and no ability to pay. It’s not just rural hospitals either.

From a doctor’s perspective, especially surgical specialist, why would you put up with that when you can focus on people with commercial insurance and make multiples with less effort. Even the most altruistic docs have a breaking point.

ETA: Hospital systems waste a crazy amount of money too, especially large teaching hospitals but atleast they get big donors to sponsor the inefficiency.

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Then close them down. I’m not sorry that Medicare and Medicaid patients have to travel for free care. Why do we care?

Allow some private equity to open the emergency centers and then drive them by ambulance if need be to the bigger cities.

There’s very very few places that are less than 2 hours from a reasonably sized hospital. Its cheaper to operate and bill ambulance services than employee a bunch of hospital staff for nothing.

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Somebody will be making the decision on who gets transferred and who doesn't. Scenario: Grandma comes in with pneumonia. The NP running triage has management breathing down her neck about keeping costs under control. She decides Grandma isn't sick enough and sends her home. Grandma goes septic and dies.

The system you describe may well be the future. But it means more people will die. I guess death panels are okay in certain circumstances.

BTW, medicare isn't "free." You're docked a payroll tax for it during your working life and once you enroll at 65 you pay a monthly premium.

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I had 20 minutes of lithotripsy done not too long ago, hospital charged $20,000.

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20 minutes, huh? I guess the machine, floor space, utilities, etc don't cost anything.

I mean, you could have kept your kidney stone if you think it was too expensive.

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They have to spend it all and run a deficit to bitch and moan how they are underfunded. It’s not about efficiency, it’s about spending to get more.

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You can’t turn anyone away.

If you have one uninsured auto accident come through the doors you can literally get dinged a million dollars over night if you are talking about an extended ICU stay and multiple surgeries. This happens everyday.

How many other sectors are forced to just eat 100k to 1million dollar loses routinely?

And before you ask how does it cost that much, there is so many man hours, medicines, rules and regulations to running an ICU and major surgery it’s insane.

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I really gotta wonder, someone with Cuban's working capital... if he thinks it's easy to make rural and urban hospitals profitable, why isn't he buying the up?

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Because he’s just blowing smoke because he knows it’s a popular topic to pile on to.

He said himself that he hasn’t looked at the books so how does he know what’s up?

He said he offered som advice and they didn’t take it. Sounds like he thinks his shite doesn’t stink and he’s upset no one listened to him.

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in a very sparsely populated area of MS (Greenwood/Grenada/Winona), there are 3 hospitals all within 25 miles of each other. Greenwood is constantly on verge of closing (any maybe Winona?), but Grenada is doing well. Why not close Greenwood and Winona and put more resources in Grenada so it can serve the other two communities?

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At least Grenada is UMMC affiliated , the others are glorified urgent cares at best. Anything remotely serious is getting shipped off ASAP

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Seriously? How much do you think a full service ambulance costs? With paramedics, drivers, fuel equipment? How many you need to shuttle hundreds of people several hours away? How much will it cost to add on the big city hospitals to accommodate the transfers? Do you think medicaid and medicare pay them anymore? What about the no-pays? That would just bankrupt the big hospitals.

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Hundreds of people? If they have 100s of people spending the night every night it’s not a rural hospital. Wtf are you talking about? My response was keeping a hospital open when they have fewer than 10 overnight patients. Yes, it would be cheaper to ambulance 2 or 3 patience a day to a large hospital than to keep a small hospital open overnight.

You understand you don’t need a hospital for normal doctor visits right? You can just have local ER’s and physician offices.

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Hundreds of people? If they have 100s of people spending the night every night it’s not a rural hospital. Wtf are you talking about? My response was keeping a hospital open when they have fewer than 10 overnight patients. Yes, it would be cheaper to ambulance 2 or 3 patience a day to a large hospital than to keep a small hospital open overnight.

You understand you don’t need a hospital for normal doctor visits right? You can just have local ER’s and physician offices

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In a multiparish area you could easily have a hundred or more on a busy night. Rapides General has a huge ER and they're usually slammed just with cases from Ellick proper. They'd be setting up MASH tents in the parking lots if they had to take in every case for 50 miles around.