Try researching an accurate number of Hospitals that have closed due to the heavy burden illegal aliens.
This Doctor being let go for exposing the fraud associated with providing care at all costs is surprising.

In L.A. county alone the number is in the hundreds of hospitals that have closed, in several communities there is no hospital at all and more closing all the time.

This is what universal health care is suppose to fix? Not, all of us together don’t have that much money.

Even after being forced to close from loses due to ‘indignant’ care cost directors refuse to blame the enormous costs of free health care for the foreign expeditionary forces invading this country for the lack of care for the rest of us.

They should be brought up on corruption charges.

Speakup on August 28, 2007 at 10:57 AM

from the illegal loving

The New York Times

Los Angeles Emergency Care Crisis Deepens
By NICK MADIGAN

Published: August 21, 2004

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 20 – A crisis in Los Angeles County’s emergency health care system became more acute this week with the announcement that the oldest hospital in the San Fernando Valley would close by Dec. 31, officials said here Friday.

News of the closing of the institution, the Northridge Hospital Medical Center campus in the Van Nuys section, which opened in 1929, follows by a week the closing of the emergency room at Elastar Community Hospital in the East Los Angeles neighborhood.

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In the last two years, four other emergency rooms, most in low-income areas, have closed in the county, primarily because of the high cost of treating thousands of uninsured people, officials said.

“We’re mandated to treat anyone who comes in through those doors, regardless of their ability to pay,” Tracey Veal, a spokeswoman for the Northridge hospital, said.

Ms. Veal estimated that the hospital had spent $13 million on so-called charity care in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. In addition, she said, the hospital faced $16 million bill for state-ordered earthquake retrofitting and could not afford it.

Since 1990, 70 hospital emergency rooms and trauma centers have closed in California, a state whose emergency and trauma system is overwhelmed and underfinanced, health officials say.

“This is definitely cause for alarm,” Carol Meyer, director of the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency, said on Friday in an interview. “The whole system is more and more tenuous.”

A severe shortage of nurses is adding to the distress, Ms. Meyer said, as new state regulations actually require adding nurses. The rules, starting on Jan. 1 and meant to be applied around the clock, say there must be no more than four patients per nurse in an emergency room. In intensive-care units, the ratio is two to one. In severe trauma cases, it is one to one, and in medical and surgical wards six to one.

“We are in real tough times here,” Ms. Meyer said. “I don’t know what the solution is going to be. The ultimate answer, of course, is money. It’s not going to change until somebody in a high position has a family member die because they couldn’t get treatment in an emergency room.”

Fewer and fewer doctors, she said, are willing to be on call to emergency rooms, given the high insurance premiums they must pay and, in many cases, the lack of reimbursement for treating the uninsured.

Ms. Meyer said 30 percent of the nine million people in the county were underinsured or had no medical insurance at all. Statewide, seven million people are uninsured, according to the California Medical Association.

“It used to be that physicians would build their practice by working in an emergency room,” said Ms. Meyer, who formerly instructed paramedics. “Now they do contracts with H.M.O.’s. They don’t need to be on call.”

The 500 hospitals in the state are “on the verge of a whole series of unraveling events,” said Dr. Jack Lewin, executive director of the California Medical Association, which represents the interests of the 35,000 doctors in the state.

Uncompensated health care, Dr. Lewin said, affects everyone in the system.

“No place is safe when you have large volumes of people who need care, but there’s no one to pay for it,” Dr. Lewin said. “Employers are increasingly forced to dump coverage of their employees and their dependents. The state used to bail us out, but no more.”

Jerry Conway, president of the 209-bed Northridge Hospital Medical Center, one of 42 such centers owned by Catholic Healthcare West in California, Arizona and Nevada, said the hospital has been losing $1 million a month for a year. The hospital, which delivers 250 babies a month and has 26,000 emergency-room visits a year, has worked out a plan to transfer much of its workload to Valley Presbyterian Hospital, a mile east, Mr. Conway said. Northridge Hospital’s sister center on Roscoe Boulevard, eight miles west, will stay open.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/national/21hospitals.html?ex=1188446400&en=71cf8ab104d84828&ei=5070

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Speakup on August 28, 2007 at 4:27 PM