By George Capsis
A reasonably prosperous Mount Sinai discovered, after they took over failing Beth Israel in 2013, that they lost $90.7 million in 2014 and $85.6 million in the first 9 months of 2015, and they are projecting even more losses for this year and into the future which Beth Israel will not now enjoy —the only question is how soon Beth Israel will be downsized and eventually closed and sold to a developer.
You can imagine a harassed Doctor Davis, the Sinai head, asking “sure the community cannot pay for exploding medical and medication costs but why should we, Mount Sinai, go bankrupt supplying them?”
And here is the real problem—medical services have more and more pulled away from the ability to pay for them.
So we can only partially blame hospital management for saying they can deliver 90% of medical services from storefront urgent care shops.
At my age with Medicare I never think of medical costs when I go into a hospital. And that is the way it should be for my daughter who is a programmer and does not always have “company health insurance” and hesitates to visit a doctor.
It will be years, many years, before we have the government paying all medical costs from cradle to grave. I know it will happen but it has to get worse—much worse.
Political vision is greatly aided by the threat of revolution.
