Say Anything Blog

This is not a good trend:

Southern Hills Medical Center says it will stop delivering babies at the end of this month after a group of doctors who handled the service resigned.

Thomas Ozburn, chief executive of Southern Hills, said the hospital would contact women pre-registered for delivery to advise them of the changes and to help them review options.

The article here is short and doesn’t go into a lot of details.  So admittedly I am probably going to be assuming too much.  Consider much of what I have to say a generalization.

However it does seem like more and more hospitals are closing up emergency rooms and maternity wards?  I’m sure that these hospitals are concerned about serving the public but when the costs to provide a service exceed the revenue you get by a large factor you have to face the reality.

Now the article does say that this hospital is near a large Hispanic area.  One has to wonder how much the illegal alien population is affecting this.  For some reason we’ve allowed ourselves to be the provider of choice to the population of Mexico.  This is just one way that the rest of us are paying for the lack of responsibility of our federal government.

I’m sure the cost of liability insurance is also leading to the consolidation of services here.  Too many people think that their bad luck means that someone is supposed to pay.  And there are plenty of unscrupulous lawyers like John Edwards that are ready to profit from that.

You also hear of emergency room closing across the country because the hospitals get stuck with so many people that don’t or won’t pay.  Emergency rooms that are open seem to overcharge those of us that are responsible enough to want to pay our own way.  I know the last time I was in the emergency room to get some stitches on my daughter on a Sunday I paid more than anyone would think was reasonable.  I could be way off base, but looking around the room I figured about half of us were paying for the other half.

This is a real tough area of public policy.  However simply mandating that hospitals provide free services to everyone means that a lot of people are going to take a take advantage of the rest of us.