Team McCain conference call: Health care

The John McCain campaign held a press conference on health care today in conjunction with a front-page Washington Post report on ties between Barack Obama’s campaign and his wife’s employer, the UCMC.  Joe Stephens reports extensively on David Axelrod’s involvement as a consultant to the hospital in revamping its care to the poor and uninsured of Chicago.  Like many hospitals, they tried to push people out of the emergency room, even though there apparently were little or no resources for community clinics:

Critics, however, describe the program as an attempt to ensure that the hospital retains only affluent patients with insurance.

“If you put enough money into it, you could save a whole bunch of community health centers,” Young said. “But to date, they haven’t.” …

“I’ve had some complaints from my constituents,” said Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, a former teacher who represents Chicago’s 4th Ward and who will be an Obama delegate at the Democratic National Convention. “It’s hard to know whether this is motivated by the interests of the patients or by the financial interests of the medical center.”

Asked her personal conclusion, Preckwinkle paused. “They have decided they need to have as many paying patients as possible,” she said. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

I missed the first part of the call, but what I did hear focused on the alleged hypocrisy of the Obamas campaigning on universal health-care access while Michelle Obama and Barack Obama’s chief strategist worked to push people out of her hospital’s emergency room.

Questions:

• Mort Kondracke: In your own health-care plan, have you figured out how much you’d have to subsidize to cover the poor? — Tax credits are budget neutral, and would put 25 million people into insurance.
• Newsday: Tax credits may not help the poor, who don’t pay taxes now; is the plan to shift people to clinics from emergency rooms is a bad idea? — In this episode, the hospital pushed people out of the emergency rooms without preparing any clinics in the community.  McCain’s plan would support the clinics.
• Me: Why is this a problem — Michelle Obama was operating on behalf of the hospital.  Why is she responsible for the issue with unaffiliated community clinics?  She could have spent the money on patients rather than expensive consultants (meaning David Axelrod).

My opinion: this particular argument isn’t the strongest that one can make on this article.  Yes, the Obamas talk about universal health care, but the hospital works in the world as it is.  It did try to fund and staff some community clinics, although not enough to cover the offload from the ER.  Michelle Obama, as a hospital executive, had to have the hospital’s interests in mind as well as the community’s.

This, however, could get more attention:

The hospital told state regulators it spent $10 million on charity care for the poor in fiscal 2007 — 1.3 percent of its total hospital expenses, according to an analysis performed for The Washington Post by the bipartisan, nonprofit Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. That is below the 2.1 percent average for nonprofit hospitals in Cook County.

As a nonprofit, the University of Chicago Medical Center receives annual tax breaks worth nearly five times as much as it spends on charity care, the analysis found.

Under those circumstances, one has to wonder why UCMC felt the need to push people out of its facilities at all.  It only spent one-fifth of its tax break on the very reason it had a tax break at all.

I’m tempted to offer a quote from Matthew here, but …