Update: McCain Selects Gov. Sarah Palin as Running Mate

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by saden1

I don't think so, in what way is your employer and the university affiliation/relationship fruitful?

You got to have birth pains when having a baby. I would imagine nothing less when it comes to fixing the problems plagued by the health care system.

It has become in no way fruitful for my employer. We have begun exploring the possiblity of divorcing ourselves from the affiliation with the Medical School.

Currently, the Medical School's physicians and faculty train their med students within our hospital. Because doctors are busy teaching students, they are not out finding as many new patients as a private doctor would. So their productivity, in terms of generating hospital revenue, has always lagged that of private docs. As a result, they have needed subsidies from my employer to break even, and keep the Medical School and their physicians financially solvent. We have been willing to provide this subsidy in the past because replacing these guys with private or employed docs would be just as costly, if not more so. But with physician reimbursement barely growing over the last few years, and their expenses skyrocketing, they have needed an increased subsidy from us. Three years ago, we gave the Med School about 30 million per year, now it's up to 80 million.

We're at the point where it no longer makes sense to allow these doctors to teach students within our hospitals, and we've begun exploring ways to divorce ourselves from the medical school and employ a private physician model or an employed physician model instead.