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Latest proposal for a post-Katrina new teaching hospital in New Orleans, to replace the flooded Charity Hospital. Full of controversy.
The future New Orleans health-care market will be able to accommodate a 484-bed Louisiana State University teaching hospital that would cost more than $1.2 billion to build, according to a long-awaited business plan that drew immediate fire from critics who say the state needs to move away from the charity system model.
The size and cost of the proposed hospital, which would serve as the main teaching hub for LSU and Tulane University medical students and post-graduate residents, far exceed any previous estimates.
The authors of the business plan said the size of the hospital is critical to its financial success, as it needs to be big enough to draw the private-pay and Medicare patients who are critical to a healthy bottom line. If the state builds a smaller hospital, as some have proposed, the beds would be filled with indigent patients and the hospital would have trouble generating enough cash to pay off its construction bonds, according to the plan.
But critics said the size and cost will continue the charity model, which they view as a dinosaur in the current health-care market, and they said the state should instead focus its energy on redirecting safety-net dollars away from the LSU system into insurance vouchers that the poor can use to seek care in the private sector.
Recipe for success?
Dr. Larry Hollier, chancellor of the LSU Health Sciences Center, said he thinks the assumptions in the business plan are conservative and that a new hospital will be able to attract many paying patients while still serving the uninsured.
"I think it will be very, very successful," he said.
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1177136614117150.xml&coll=1
The future New Orleans health-care market will be able to accommodate a 484-bed Louisiana State University teaching hospital that would cost more than $1.2 billion to build, according to a long-awaited business plan that drew immediate fire from critics who say the state needs to move away from the charity system model.
The size and cost of the proposed hospital, which would serve as the main teaching hub for LSU and Tulane University medical students and post-graduate residents, far exceed any previous estimates.
The authors of the business plan said the size of the hospital is critical to its financial success, as it needs to be big enough to draw the private-pay and Medicare patients who are critical to a healthy bottom line. If the state builds a smaller hospital, as some have proposed, the beds would be filled with indigent patients and the hospital would have trouble generating enough cash to pay off its construction bonds, according to the plan.
But critics said the size and cost will continue the charity model, which they view as a dinosaur in the current health-care market, and they said the state should instead focus its energy on redirecting safety-net dollars away from the LSU system into insurance vouchers that the poor can use to seek care in the private sector.
Recipe for success?
Dr. Larry Hollier, chancellor of the LSU Health Sciences Center, said he thinks the assumptions in the business plan are conservative and that a new hospital will be able to attract many paying patients while still serving the uninsured.
"I think it will be very, very successful," he said.
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1177136614117150.xml&coll=1
