The facility that Mr. Taylor leads is a physician-owned hospital but is unique because 80 percent of the patients it serves are either enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare (a health plan for military men and women) or uninsured. U.S. News & World Report recently named OCH as the top hospital in the country for the lowest Medicare co-pays per patient.
Mr. Taylor hopes to call attention to the successes of his facility as means to better educate community members and policy makers about the importance of smart healthcare reform. Mr. Taylor recently authored a white paper on the need for universal healthcare without increased governmental control and will serve as the keynote speaker at a healthcare rally taking place in his community later this month.
At the rally, Mr. Taylor plans to share his insights about healthcare reform to a general audience in hopes of educating them about the issue.
“I plan to focus on the need for expanded healthcare coverage and explain the rational for universal coverage,” says Mr. Taylor. “I find it useful to compare healthcare as an essential service, such as public utilities. These utilities, such as water, power and sewer, work best if regulated, and everyone is plugged into the system.
“By explaining our hospital’s unique perspective and success, I hope to show people that a governmental system can work,” says Mr. Taylor. “We are a for-profit organization, but we provide care to a higher percentage of governmental and uninsured patients than most of the charitable healthcare organizations in our area.”
Mr. Taylor intends to argue against attacks on physician-owned hospitals by sharing his facility’s story with a wider audience.
“The fight against physician-owned hospitals is focused on getting politicians to believe that any physician-owned system will be guilty of cherry picking and overutilization, but if you look at us, we are a non-integrated system with a very low utilization curve,” says Mr. Taylor. “We need to be smarter about reform. Simply lumping all physician-owned hospitals together and then cutting them off isn’t going to fix what’s wrong with healthcare.
“I understand the economic necessitates of reform, but we have to be smarter about it,” he says. “A few years ago in Missouri, our Medicaid program underwent radical reform. Our legislators voted to eliminate reimbursement for all rehabilitation services, which is similar to what is being proposed now for physician-owned hospitals. Most politicians didn’t understand what they were doing, and now we have horror stories of patients who don’t have access to the rehabilitation care that might have helped them get back to work and off Medicaid.”
Mr. Taylor encourages other hospital leaders to share their experiences and views on healthcare reform with community members and legislators.
“Healthcare leaders have to get out there and have their voices heard, otherwise who knows what we’regoing to get in these reform packages,” says Mr. Taylor. “Healthcare is a very complicated topic, and politicians don’t always understand it well. Those of us that do understand it need to share our knowledge so that we can create a system that best serves our patients and our industry.”
Learn more about Ozarks Community Hospital.
