Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
With the two biggest appropriations in Congress this session about health care, U.S. Rep. Mark Souder was out doing his homework.
He stopped by Kosciusko Community Hospital Friday, taking a brief tour through the birthing center and visiting with Chief Executive Officer Mike Mullins and Joan Darr, chief operating officer/chief nursing officer.
Later the three met in the hospital's board room to dissect the U.S. health care system.
Kosciusko Community Hospital, a member of Triad Hospital's Lutheran Health Network, has been one of the survivors of the health care shakeup.
Souder said medical doctors, HMOs, medical insurance companies and specialists hated the proposed Clinton health care plan, which would have doled out money with few checks and balances.
He was one of the congressmen elected with support of the medical community, a topic that shaped the political debates in 1994. Now the politicians are fragmented again.
The fallout, however, has been more and more regulation with less and less being paid by Medicare and Medicaid.
Hospitals either survived, as KCH has, by being bought up by a mega-corporation and sharing services regionally, expanding birthing services and adding an extensive array of outpatient services or going belly up.
Mullins said Medicare pays 20 percent of the charges for surgeries. With 30 percent of KCH's patients on Medicare, 6 percent to 7 percent on Medicaid, a 2 percent to 3 percent bad debt and 15 percent to 20 percent of the people seeking services on a managed care contract, about 50 percent of the patients are providing the profit margins.
Those "profits" are expected to buy the latest in technology, medication and flexibility in services.
Mullins isn't sure how hospitals with a higher percentage of Medicare patients are surviving.
"I'll be buying a new CT scanner for $1- to $1.5 million," he said. "The DuPont Medical Center was built north of Fort Wayne just to reach the 'paying' population."
