As investors buy struggling hospitals, big change comes to New Jersey health care
AUGUST 23, 2014, 8:38 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 2014, 7:05 AM
BY LINDY WASHBURN
STAFF WRITER
THE RECORD
Bayonne Medical Center wasn’t just bragging about efficiency when it posted a big digital clock on a highway billboard a few years ago to show the real-time waits in its emergency room. It wanted patients to come to its ER. Lots of patients.
Big change comes to New Jersey health care
It didn’t matter if the hospital was in the patient’s insurance network. On the contrary, to the businessmen who had recently purchased the medical center, those “out-of-network” patients held the key to reversing Bayonne’s fortunes.
These owners, who bought the hospital in bankruptcy, had found an unintended — and very profitable — consequence to a state regulation that was designed to protect patients with urgent medical needs. While the regulation required insurance companies to pay for emergency treatment at hospitals where their coverage wasn’t normally accepted, it did nothing to control the size of the bills the hospitals could submit to those insurers.
And that loophole enabled Bayonne, which had ended its contracts with some of the state’s largest insurers, to charge those higher out-of-network rates. The result was striking: The strategy contributed to a $17 million operational profit within two years of its 2008 takeover.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/as-investors-buy-struggling-hospitals-big-change-comes-to-new-jersey-health-care-1.1072639#sthash.PllalMQW.dpuf
