Texas Hospitals Say They've Lost Insured Patients to Urgent Care

[unhappycamper]

http://kdhnews.com/news/texas/texas-hospitals-say-they-ve-lost-insured-patients-to-urgent/article_b654b324-cc57-558f-93a3-34b542fd46f3.html

Texas Hospitals Say They've Lost Insured Patients to Urgent Care
Posted: Friday, August 29, 2014 6:00 am

Opting to skip the wait at hospital emergency rooms, an increasing number of Texans are choosing to use urgent care centers that are popping up in strip malls and shopping districts.

Promoting themselves as cheaper and quicker alternatives to hospital emergency rooms, the clinics cater to patients who need stitches, X-rays of broken bones or treatment of allergic reactions. Some clinics have been around for years, and about 300 open each year across the country.

The increasing number of urgent care centers is proving problematic for Texas hospitals. Hospitals say they are competing with the clinics for the same pool of insured Texans, at a time when they are also getting less money to cover the cost of treating uninsured patients.

“Competition is generally a good thing, but it needs to be a level playing field,” said John Hawkins, senior vice president for government relations for the Texas Hospital Association.

[Gothmog]

1. Texas hospitals are being punished and hurt by Perry's refusal to expand medicaid

Insured patients are being encouraged to use urgent care facilities by their policies and the hospitals are left with the uninsured who wold have been covered under medicaid

[Moosepoop]

2. Yes.

The use of urgent care centers would be a good thing for the hospitals in that the ERs would not be clogged up with non-emergency cases, but the lack of expanded Medicaid puts the hospitals in a financial bind. Will the hospital associations have enough pull with the state elected officials to affect change regarding the Medicaid issue? I hope so, but I'm afraid that they don't, as I assume that they would have exercised it when the original decision was being made. Surely they would have foreseen this exact scenario playing out, and done whatever they could to influence the decision, at least I would hope so.