$700 Million for Struggling Brooklyn Hospitals
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that One Brooklyn Health — a conglomeration of Interfaith Medical Center, Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center and Brookdale Medical Center — will receive a substantial share of the $700 million that the administration has held for more than two years with the promise that it would one day be used to transform health care in central Brooklyn.
Why it matters:
Brookdale alone has cost $100-$150M annually. The state spends $250 million a year keeping the lights on in these hospitals. That’s tax money that could be spent on anything else if the state can somehow figure out how to make these three hospitals more financially sound.
With state and federal reforms they are exposed. Adapting to a reimbursement landscape in which payment is increasingly linked to performance has become a fail. Ironically, the very reason for this fail is that the State links performance with Medicaid funding.
In other words if you are a hospital already in need of a lifeline Medicaid was paying you ‘X,’ now the managed Medicaid people come and say we are going to pay you $2000 less per discharge. The new reimbursement shift to pay per performance vs a fee for service reimbursements consistent with Obamacare. Its designed to reward value over volume with financial incentives to keep patients healthy through preventive care and early disease detection rather than running up expenditures.
The downward spiral continues as Medicaid Patients are likely to select a more prestigious hospital whenever possible. See how your Hospital ranks here. 40 percent of Brookdale Hospital patients indicating that they would definitely recommend the hospital. Wyckoff Heights and Interfaith also scored poorly – less than 50 percent of their patients reported that ‘they would definitely recommend the hospital. Sadly, with such low scores a State spending strategy alone has not solved the problem in the past nor likely in the future.