Re-post from NorthJersey.com | Written by Lindy Washburn
Bayonne Medical Center wasn’t just bragging about efficiency when it posted a big digital clock on a highway billboard a few years ago to show the real-time waits in its emergency room. It wanted patients to come to its ER. Lots of patients.
It didn’t matter if the hospital was in the patient’s insurance network. On the contrary, to the businessmen who had recently purchased the medical center, those “out-of-network” patients held the key to reversing Bayonne’s fortunes.
These owners, who bought the hospital in bankruptcy, had found an unintended — and very profitable — consequence to a state regulation that was designed to protect patients with urgent medical needs. While the regulation required insurance companies to pay for emergency treatment at hospitals where their coverage wasn’t normally accepted, it did nothing to control the size of the bills the hospitals could submit to those insurers.
Read rest of article here and how this topic relates to NJ Appleseed’s work.
New Jersey Appleseed is happy to announce the launch of the Law and Public Policy Blog. We welcome former New Jersey Law Journal reporter Mary Pat Gallagher, who will be posting regularly on a variety of issues, with an emphasis on government transparency and accountability, access to affordable health care and housing and other issues pertinent to social and economic justice.