Not only are over 500 physicians going to have to find new residency programs, but the hospital also employees more than 800 nurses and several thousand other ancillary staff.
And one source said that’s indeed how they found out the hospital was closing, most likely in September! :mad:
Certainly most of them knew SOMETHING was going on, because the hospital had been sold several times in recent years, but good grief - what a bomb to get dropped on you, especially if you’re a new graduate (not just in medicine, but also pharmacy, nursing, x-ray, etc.) and probably relocated for this job. I know Philly’s a big city, but it probably can’t absorb that many health care workers.
Soon I’ll be two for two on places I trained in Philadelphia going defunct.
One hospital in our system shut down recently (an urban facility which had long been losing money), and the response from civic leaders was much the same - indignation about the closing but no willingness to pump money into the place.
How does a hospital in a major city lose money, considering how much they charge for even an aspirin tablet? We’ve all been unhappy about how much healthcare costs in the US, but no one seems to know where the money is going.
Because what they charge bears little resemblance to what they actually get paid, unless the unfortunate patient is paying out-of-pocket and can actually pay it. Otherwise, the actual payment rate is set by the terms of the contract with the payor (insurance company) or by Medicare administration (and many insurance contracts base their payments on some percentage of Medicare rates).
The place I did my residency shut down long ago. Now I have to hope my med school keeps its doors open, I guess. If not, I suppose my diploma will lose its shine.
A pity for the young docs in training, a pity for the patients they serve there. Honestly the corporatizing of american medicine to ensure maximum profit for shareholders runs contrary to public health.
Because, quite frankly, Hannehman isn’t a very good hospital. I mean it’s Ok, and if it were plopped down in most of the rest of the country it could be the best hospital around. But Philly is a medical powerhouse with top facilities like Penn, Presbyterian, Pennsylvania Hospital, Children’s hospital, Temple, and such. Hannehman rates at the bottom here,sad to say.
One of the for-profit entities that briefly owned it in recent years was Tenet Health. When I was job-hunting a few years ago, I refused to apply for jobs at Tenet facilities because I just never heard one good thing about that company, and figured that in itself played a big role in that hospital’s demise.
As for “the cost of an aspirin”, the aspirin costs a few cents; the seemingly exorbitant charge is from the doctor’s and nurse’s time in ordering it and transmitting said order to the pharmacy, the pharmacy’s time filling and delivering it, and then the nurse giving it to the patient and charting it. I also understand that Hahnemann is/was in an area that skewed low-income, so a lot of people were un(der)insured.
Interesting thing about the name: Dr. Hahnemann was the founder of homeopathy, which is essentially the use of placebos to treat disease. OTOH, back then, placebos probably weren’t much worse than the remedies available at the time.
