The word “crisis” is one of those media buzz words that really doesn’t mean much anymore. It’s a great newspaper headline word and a lead-in teaser for television news shows. Usually just means there’s a problem. Sometimes it’s not even all that big. The latest “crisis” we have been fed in recent months and especially in recent weeks is in the health care arena. Locally, emergency rooms have been closing right and left. Last week it really hit close to home when officials at Northridge Hospital Medical Center Sherman Way campus abruptly decided to close their ER way ahead of the shuttering of the whole hospital at the end of the year. They decided to close the ER Oct. 4 when they could no longer meet state requirements that emergency rooms have doctors with certain skills on call. These doctors don’t get reimbursed for their charity care and many cases at the Northridge campus are charity cases. So they don’t get enough doctors. You really can’t blame them. I expect to get paid for my work. And, that’s not the problem. The problem is that the so-called health care crisis, not only in the Valley but throughout the country, has been allowed to grow and fester without any real healing. No one wants to make the hard decisions to make our health care system work for everybody. So where do we go from here? First of all, we can’t let the Sherman Way campus of Northridge Hospital Medical Center close and become condominiums or a strip mall. A group of physicians is trying to raise $10 million to keep the hospital open. It’s hard to imagine they can make money running the facility when the other owners couldn’t. But maybe they can scale their operations down to make it more financially successful and still provide some services. That still doesn’t solve the broader health-care problems. There are so many uninsured people that providing health care services has become unmanageable and costs of treatments are just out of control. Inefficiencies in the system also contribute to the problems. Then there’s the state mandated seismic retrofits and tough nurse-patient ratios. There needs to be a full-scale national summit on the health care “crisis” led by the President of the United States where people such as members of Congress, academics, patients themselves, employers, employees all get together to come up with reasonable solutions with a definite deadline and goals outlined. President Clinton tried it in the 1990s but politicians and the industry blew him off. They didn’t like Hillary’s involvement. I think we’re all ready to talk about it now because conditions have become so dire. It is a “crisis.” But solutions can’t come only at the national level. That may take too long. A similar summit needs to take place at the state level. But Republicans and Democrats must really get over themselves and truly work together to figure out what to do. U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has an interesting proposal on all this. She is proposing that health care costs be tax deductible for people. Be careful, what’s the end result of this for public coffers? But it’s worth exploring. Another proposal seems more do-able. That is the current Proposition 67 which would put a surcharge on telephone bills that would go to doctors and hospitals to pay for emergency care. That seems fair on its face because everybody uses the phone. It’s not an unfair tax, it seems. But people opposed to this can say why are we linking phone use and health care? Do they really have anything in common? At least it’s a concrete proposal to make the health care situation better. If anybody has a good answer to this problem let me know. We really need to deal with this. Business Journal Editor Jason Schaff can be reached at (818) 316-3125
