If you’ve ever wondered about runaway health care costs, maybe you shouldn’t blame the government. Blame non-profit, monopolistic health care organizations.
Such as Carilion Health System in Roanoke.
In a scathing Wall Street Journal story on the front page this morning, Carilion, the only name in the game in Roanoke, was taken apart for excessive power, abusing its pricing, throttling the local news media and harrassing patients for non-payment.
Here are a few choice items from that story:
- Carilion’s monop0oly in Roanoke means that the area has the highest medical costs in Virginia.
- Colonoscopies at Carilion cost four to 10 times what other area centers charge.
- Neck CTs are nearly three times what area centers charge.
- The compensation of its chief executive, Dr. Edward Murphy, has tripled in recent years to $2.07 million.
- After consolidating two hospitals in Roanoke a few years ago, Carilion forced local doctors to sell their private practices to them. If they did not, they got no referrals from Carilion.
- When Jeff Sturgeon, a reporter for the Roanoke Times, covered the controversy aggressively, Carilion complained and Sturgeon was shifted to another beat.
- Carilion is so pushy in going after non-paying patients that the General District Court in Roanoke devotes one day each week to dealing with liens and lawsuits filed by the health system.
- A massive construction project now underway is the object of accusations of self-dealing.
The odd thing about all of this is that non-profit hospitals were originally established to help indigent patients. But Carilion morphed into something else. Just as the federal government warned in 1989, an unhealthy monopoloy was formed when Carilion merged with another hospital.
Issues such as these are huge for Virginia and the rest of the nation. Hopefully cries for universal health care will get some traction because obviously, in this case, the free market is not working. Life, death and health should not be business decisions affected by sharks who run monopolies.
It is especially disheartening the see the local media intimidated. But I can believe it. A few years ago I edited a magazine in Richmond. We ran a legitimate story about doctors in Virginia Beach forming their own boutique practices because they were unhappy with the business-as-usual approaches to health care.
A few months later I was called into a darkened room by the publisher and a representative from human resources. There, I was rebuked and told that the doctor story was “a pencil in the eye of managed care.”
Peter Galuszka
