Healthcare - The incredibly disingenuous UVM Health news stories
Haven't really posted on reddit, but want to draw attention to how screwed up UVM Health current actions are:
This is a vent + attempt at raising awareness of how self-interested the leadership of UVM Health is (and how the Green Mountain Care Board, while better in the past two years, is still not doing their duty of properly regulating the hospital).
A few news stories over the past two weeks, and a Vermont Public interview, drove me up a wall. There's an ongoing crisis of administrative overhead and out-of-state profit transfers at UVM Health. Both state regulators and UVM Health's own hired auditors have named administrative costs as the primary driver of its high prices.
Meanwhile, UVM Medical Center charges private insurers 315% of what it charges Medicare — versus 190% at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, a nearly identical academic medical center a 90-minute drive away. That's 65% more than a comparable neighbor. And until the Green Mountain Care Board finally blocked it this year, UVM Health was still shipping Vermont profits across the lake to prop up money-losing hospitals in New York — a state with its own programs to fund care for patients who need it. So the provider that handles 85% of Vermont's healthcare has been taking from the state to cover its New York losses, while leaving New York's own programs on the table.
But what most upset me was the PR push: UVM Health loudly touting cost cuts it knows will be unpopular — trimming clinicians and its employees' own health benefits — in a transparent attempt to win public sympathy rather than bring its administrative pay in line with the rest of the country's (well-paid) academic health centers.
Link to post with data: https://middlesexgazette.org/opinion/uvm-health-cutting-the-wrong-costs/