![]() ![]() “Picu kids don’t belong here,” an overwhelmed E.R. But when even the largest pediatric floors in the country are at capacity, the pileup of critically ill children in E.R.s can cause patients’ conditions to worsen. Hospitals that no longer admit children rely on transferring them to pediatric units at other hospitals. ![]() But even higher Medicaid and private rates wouldn’t come close to what hospitals can charge for remunerative adult procedures, and with many state budgets already strained, experts say the regulatory move is unrealistic. Health policy experts say an important solution would be to encourage hospitals to care for children by increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates. Democratic senators introduced a bill last year to grant funding to specialized children’s hospitals to improve their infrastructure, but it has not moved past the assigned committee. There have been no aggressive legislative efforts to keep hospitals from closing or shrinking their pediatric units. More than a third of children in the United States are enrolled in Medicaid. Physician reimbursement through Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income people, is often only about 70 percent of the amount reimbursed through Medicare, the insurance program for elderly people of all incomes. Young patients like Lachlan, who has private insurance, occupy beds to recover from infections or asthma attacks but don’t undergo lucrative, billable procedures - like joint or heart surgeries - that are more common among aging patients. It’s just a question of where we’re going to fight,” said his mother, Aurora Rutledge, looking frightened as she twisted the blond ringlets that poked out from under Lachlan’s Spider-Man headphones. So on a September morning, after coming down with Covid for the fourth time and with what looked like bilateral pneumonia, Lachlan was struggling to breathe in an overcrowded emergency room at the Children’s Hospital at Saint Francis - the only remaining inpatient pediatric option in Tulsa. John Medical Center in Tulsa, with collapsed veins and oxygen levels so low, he was unresponsive to his mother’s voice.īut in April the hospital closed its children’s floor to make room for more adult beds. Those conditions repeatedly landed him in the pediatric intensive care unit at Ascension St. The kindergartner has a connective tissue disorder, severe allergies and asthma. It was Lachlan Rutledge’s sixth birthday, but as he mustered a laborious breath and blew out one candle, it was his mother who made a wish: for a pediatric hospital bed in northeast Oklahoma. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |