St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan has been helping people for over 150 years, and has “treated victims of calamities, from the cholera epidemic of 1849 to the sinking of the Titanic, the 9/11 terrorist attack and, just last year, the Hudson River landing of US Airways Flight 1549,” reports Anemona Hartocollis from The New York Times. However, the hospital is now struggling to stay alive, and a big chain of hospitals has “proposed to take over St. Vincent’s, shut down its inpatient beds and most of its emergency room services, and convert it into an outpatient center tied into the chain’s own hospitals uptown and across town to the east,” states Hartocollis. If St. Vincent’s were to be taken over, it could be the end of the last Roman Catholic general hospital in New York City.
St. Vincent’s is severely in debt, and was given a $6 million emergency loan by the state to help the hospital meet its payroll. Hartocollis says, “How St. Vincent’s went from a cherished neighborhood amenity to a relic of times past is a chronicle of mismanagement compounded by the economics of the health care industry, changes in the fabric of a historic neighborhood and the low profit potential in religious work.”
The Catholic order, Sisters of Charity, that founded the hospital in 1849 got together to discuss the proposed takeover, and said they are determined to fight to keep their hospital alive. One of the Sisters of Charity said one of the most important things to them is to serve the poor, which some industry executives suggest “may have helped make the hospital obsolete,” states Hartocollis. Other hospitals “emphasize high-tech care and rush to invest in the fancy equipment and celebrity doctors that attract patients with the means to pay for them,” yet, St. Vincent’s is “stuck to its motto of “compassionate care,” rooted in its origins as a place that trained nurses and that was under the auspices of nuns,” says Hartocollis. And as the neighborhood of St. Vincent’s changed, St. Vincent’s did not change, which lead to a 10% decrease of patients admitted into the hospital from 1996 to 2007.
According to Hartocollis, officials blame the hospital’s decline on “a high rate of poor and uninsured patients as well as federal Medicare cuts, state Medicaid cuts and the hospital’s inability to negotiate favorable contracts with health insurance companies, claiming their fees were 30 percent below the market rate.” In order to stay alive, the hospital merged with a few other Catholic hospitals in 2000, but today the hospital is in a very troubling position, however, people in Greenwich Village who are committed to St. Vincent’s are ready to fight.
If you are uninsured, visit pricedoc.com to compare prices for any medical procedure you might need, and to find affordable, quality doctors and dentists in your area.
Related Posts:
Previous post: The33TV.com Covers PriceDoc
Next post: Cosmetic Surgery Re-Dos
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }