Linking Health Care for the Poor to Health Care for Profit
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1987
Keywords
access to care, health care providers, taxes, medicaid, organization of care, uncompensated care, payment, cost sharing, managed care, debt service
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.6.1.129
Abstract
New linkages between the private sector and government are needed in tackling the problem of ensuring adequate, cost-effective health care for the indigent. More than 21 million people were Medicaid recipients in 1984. 1 As many as 35 million people may be uninsured during the year. 2 In 1986, the nation's health care providers lost at least 6.5 percent of their gross patient revenues to uncompensated care. 3 As these numbers show, the financing and management of the nation's indigent care services are at best a poor-man's compromise that is forcing out the proprietaries and not-for-profits, locking public hospitals into a no-win marketplace, and sentencing the nation's indigent and uninsured to an explicit, separate tier of health care.
The economic and social fallout from this dilemma is forcing government and private industry to create innovative ways to finance indigent and uncompensated care, and to induce the health care marketplace to provide cost-effective, mainstreamed services to the indigent. Part of the solution may lie in linking the providers' ongoing need for capital and working capital with the provision of health care services to indigent populations, and financing the venture with a combination of the public securities markets and a commitment of Medicaid funds at the state level.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Health Affairs, v.6, no. 1, p. 129-135
Scholar Commons Citation
Wolfson, Jay; Levin, Peter J.; and Brock, William J., "Linking Health Care for the Poor to Health Care for Profit" (1987). Health Policy and Management Faculty Publications. 9.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/hpm_facpub/9
