THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 5, 1995 TAG: 9508310017
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 45 lines
Health-care costs skyrocketed for decades. They still rise, but less swiftly.
Insurance companies, companies that have set up their own health-insurance programs and the federal government are paying physicians, hospitals and other providers of care less generously than in the past, pushing providers hard to cut costs. Hospital stays are markedly shorter than in earlier decades. Outpatient surgery is up, inpatient surgery is down.
There clearly was much fat in the health-care system. The nation has twice as many acute-care hospital beds as it needs; hospitals are closing and merging. Physicians are selling their practices to hospitals, management companies and insurers or uniting to market their services. In some places, the unthinkable has happened: Physicians' practices have turned unprofitable or barely profitable. Some physicians have elected to stop practicing medicine and gone into other fields.
There's no end in sight to revolutionary change in the ways that physicians, hospitals and other health-care providers dispense medical services and how Americans pay for them.
Medicaid and Medicare, the giant government health-care-payment programs, are targeted for sharp cuts. Nonetheless, their expenditures relentlessly increase as poverty spreads and America grays.
At the same time, millions of Americans - by some estimates, 43.5 million (out of 262 million) are without health insurance. The number swells by more than a million a year. Cutting Medicaid and Medicare will make it swell faster.
This trend intensifies the anxieties of middle Americans already alarmed by the wholesale disappearance of jobs offering decent pay and benefits - health insurance not least among them - who tend to blame bloated government for the ills afflicting them. Meanwhile, following the rejection of President Clinton's monstrously bureaucratic proposal for reform, neither remedy nor painkiller for the health-care crisis is on the horizon. by CNB