So the University of Vermont Medical Center is hitting up the Green Mountain Care Board for a multimillion-dollar Certificate of Need to construct a new surgical facility [“Pre-Op Exam: UVM Medical Center Asks State Regulators to Approve a $130 Million Surgical Facility,” May 29]. This is an old song that we’ve heard so often before, not just with UVM Medical Center, but in so many other aspects of American business. If you build some shiny new multimillion-dollar facility or whatever, it will shore up underperforming divisions and turn the ship around.
The real motive for this proposal is in the last paragraph of the article: “The center would begin paying for itself almost immediately and, by 2030, could generate an annual net profit of at least $10 million, even after accounting for the 75 new hires that would be needed to staff the facility, hospital officials said.”
That $10 million undoubtedly would be more by 2030. With Green Mountain Care Board approval, UVM Medical Center could charge higher fees and rates for this new facility, compelling insurance companies to pass on these charges to the public so that many of us would not be able to afford to have surgeries at this new surgery center we paid for.
It is about the positive cash flow coming from patients who are pumped through as consumers to meet revenue forecasts and hospital margins. If you go bigger — create a larger monopoly — then you can get the highest prices the market will bear.
This is the tragedy of American health care.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier