OPINION | Why the Shirtless Man Shouting on the Street Isn’t in the Hospital | South Seattle Emerald
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In Seattle and elsewhere, private hospitals, nonprofits limiting their charity care, and for-profits aren’t interested in those mentally ill patients on the street, especially not when multiple publicly owned and taxpayer-subsidized hospitals already abound in the same county. Why? Because these patients are poor, and their Medicaid insurance pays less to the hospital and professionals than Medicare and private insurance pay.

“Follow the money” helps us figure this out. Inpatient hospital beds generate two bills: facility fees and professional fees. In most public hospitals, both go to support the whole operation. But not at UW Medicine, which operates a separate company, UW Physicians (aka Association of University Physicians), that uses the professional fees to pay bonuses to physician leadership, doubling and tripling (the former dean) their State-paid compensation to over $1 million annually for several. So a Harborview neurosurgeon earning $657,000 in his State paycheck collected another $430,000 from the private company, as well as $127,000 in “other compensation.” Altogether, 831 UW Medicine leaders earn at least $100,000 each extra from this company that collects, then redistributes professional fees paid for subspecialty surgery and intensive care on mostly private insurance patients.

  • reversebananimals@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    I doubt it will be anything more than drugging people to make babysitting them easier.

    This is why we don’t lock up “the shirtless man shouting in the street” the first place.

    We used to lock that guy up, and the places we put them were horrific. In the 70s, American society collectively decided it was better to let them back out on the street than to risk locking up sane people against their will.

    Its a dilemma. We either funnel them into a horrific, underfunded system (our government will not realistically produce anything better), probably also catching a few sane people in the system along the way, or we let “the shirtless man shouting on the street” stay on the street.