Quote:
Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins
Hospitals don't budget for max capacity because they don't have the staff to handle that kind of patient volume for very long at all. Nursing shortages are at critical levels. I know for a fact of hospital systems that have falsely reported the acuteness of their patients so that they can run with staffing levels that their regulations do not allow them to do. Also, ICU cases are not necessarily profitable in-and-of themselves. If you have people that are self pay or have catastrophic coverage they are still going to be given treatment in line with the severity of their illness. The biggest place where I've seen discussions regarding coverage come into play is placement for people after their acute illness is over--whether insurance will pay for inpatient rehab vs. a nursing home, for example.
COVID isn't necessarily a boon for the budget, either. As a quick example, CMS only reimburses a hospital $500 for a monoclonal infusion.
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I agree staffing is a bitch right now. Burnout and Layoffs because of shor mandates don’t help.
I’m not a health care expert. I just posted an Atlantic article that stated almost 60% of hospitalizations are mild to asymptomatic. Twice as much as it was pre delta and why numbers were at an all time high.
Remember when you couldn’t even go to the hospital or take a covid test unless you had severe symptoms last year? Remember when they canceled all elective surgeries? Told people to stay home unless you were dying?
Well they didn’t do that this year based on information given to them by the CDC. They weren’t prepared, they didn’t plan or budget accordingly because they believed the worst was behind them.
I’m not blaming hospitals for this mess. Just trying to bring perspective to the notion that I think it was a perfect storm and more than half of the patients in hospitals are not in bad shape AT ALL from Covid.
Cases are going down, hospitalizations are going down, hopefully deaths also. Hoping the next wave is not as bad.