Hospital Association of Southern California Responds to City Attorney's Allegations of Hospitals Causing Homelessness
Posted on: Thursday, 22 February 2007, 18:01 CST
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- It is unfortunate that the Los Angeles City Attorney and other elected officials feel the need to blame hospitals for a problem that they need to remedy. In his press release on predatory legislation he is sponsoring, Rocky Delgadillo asserts that "Hospitals should not cause homelessness" and recommends prosecution of hospitals under new criminal penalties and fines.
We are bewildered by the City Attorney and other elected officials who share his perspective because they know that hospitals in no way cause homelessness. If anything, we are the only non-governmental entity required by law to provide unpaid services to the homeless. In fact, hospitals in Los Angeles County treat more than 18,000 homeless patients each year at a cost that contributes mightily to the more than $2 billion in unpaid care that Los Angeles hospitals provide every year to our uninsured residents.
We have asked the City Attorney and other elected officials to help on this issue because hospital workers want to be able to refer patients no longer in need of acute hospital care to more appropriate and less costly non-hospital service providers. And these providers just so happen to be located on skid row in downtown L.A. ... but in insufficient numbers. That's where Delgadillo and other government officials can help.
We do not need more punitive laws to hammer hospitals. Existing federal law and regulation requires hospitals to have patient discharge protocols in place and to treat and stabilize persons who present without regard to their ability to pay or residence status. A hospital found to be in flagrant violation of this could lose its ability to treat and bill for Medicare and Medi-Cal patients, which would put any such hospital in California out of business. We don't need a new hammer ... we need a safety net. We need more services for the homeless.
Accordingly, we ask the City Council of Los Angeles and the State Legislature to seriously address the problem that homeless individuals have in LA County and not make scapegoats of our hospitals who give, give, and give again to provide health care to the poor and uninsured. We extend, yet again, an invitation to the city attorney and other elected officials to work with us. Creating criminal liability for hospitals is a counter productive way of addressing this problem.
The Hospital Association of Southern California is a trade group representing approximately 200 hospitals serving Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties.
Hospital Association of Southern California
CONTACT: Jim Lott, Executive Vice President of Hospital Association ofSouthern California, +1-213-324-3262
Source: PRNewswire
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