We go the wrong direction in all the reforms in this state, we cannot continue to dump money into failing policies like hospitals and schools. Structural reforms are needed but god forbid we do any of that, the labor unions and all the rest come out of the woodwork and paint the bleak picture and we buy it.

NY’S BLOATED HOSPITALS

December 20, 2007 — EVEN as the ‘08 presidential candidates stress the need to reform health care, New York state is leading the way - backward.

A year after the landmark Berger Commission report called for modest cuts in New York’s excess hospital capacity, the state has lost ground.

Thanks to years of unwise government intervention, New York has long had one of the nation’s most expensive state health-care systems. Starting in the early ’80s, it began a misguided effort to control costs by fixing the price of every procedure performed at every hospital in the state. But that “reform” also tried to help to help financially troubled hospitals, as well as those with excess capacity, by letting them charge higher rates - in other words, it rewarded hospitals with failed management at the expense of successful ones. So the system grew even more bloated and expensive.

All this government involvement also encouraged hospitals and their workers to become political players - lobbying for ever-greater government subsidies and extra spending on public programs like Medicaid, and against reform efforts that might slow the relentless rise in costs.

As a result, the state pays for about half of all spending on personal health care in New York; other states pay an average of about 40 percent. One big culprit is the state’s Medicaid program, which spends more than twice the per-capita national average.

To rein in health-care costs, then-Gov. George Pataki and the leaders of the state Legislature set up the bipartisan Berger Commission back in 2003, naming investment banker Stephen Berger (a Manhattan Democrat) as its head. Its goal: recommend ways to shrink the system and make it more efficient.

Late last year, the Berger report came out - calling for, among other things, a modest state push to downsize the hospital and nursing-home industries by eliminating about 20 percent of excess capacity. When Gov. Spitzer endorsed the commission’s recommendations early this year, the state finally seemed on the path to reform.
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