Dale Folwell, our State Treasurer, is nearing the end of his term. He is warning that the State Health Plan is running out of money.
He talks about what the state’s hospital systems must do:
In addition to hospitals abiding by President Biden and President Trump’s executive order on price transparency, he said hospitals need to match their charity care.
“Not their retail charity care or some trumped-up number on charity care, but the actual charity care with the tax benefit they receive,” Folwell said. “Number three, stop breaking people’s kneecaps for not paying their bills. Number four, the General Assembly needs to repeal the con on the people of this state with Certificate of Need, and number five, these multi-millionaire hospital executives need to have the courage to show their contract and their compensation package, which I think will prove that their board of trustees are incentivized to put profits over patients and as long as the boards of trustees are not holding these CEO’s accountable and always putting profits over patients, it’s going to be very difficult to solve this problem.”
… Folwell also commented on the “cartel” of major hospitals in the state buying out some of the smaller hospitals, calling their billing practices, “immoral.”
Folwell has been a great leader– an outstanding State Treasurer. He will be missed. He is very perceptive when he calls out the fact that these corrupt “non-profit” institutions are extending excessive compensation packages to their executives; and are functioning like for-profit enterprises. That drives up costs for everyone.
But in the case of these putatively non-profit institutions, it is obviously not shareholders who benefit. Instead, it is the hospital system executive class that seeks to monopolize the health care marketplace for their own benefit.
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