You know that you are in trouble when Wal-Mart and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are on the same side of an issue and you are on the other side. As has been widely reported, both Wal-Mart and the SEIU are urging the Obama administration to pass healthcare reform.  Part of their statement on the issue included this: “Support for a mandate (for insurance coverage for all) also requires the strongest possible commitment to rein in healthcare costs. Guaranteeing cost containment is essential.”

What is not clear is how the SEIU expects to rein in healthcare costs and not have its members take a financial hit? Maybe they are looking at how the Obama adminstration handled the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies. Based on how the unions faired in those cases, maybe the SEIU is expecting everyone else to take the hit but them?  

What is also not clear is how these strange bed fellows expect to suspend the laws of economics. If you give everyone health insurance, thus guaranteeing a big increase in demand, but do nothing to increase the supply of doctors and nurses, the laws of economics say that prices will rise, not go down.  The government’s history with price controls (during World War II) is part of how we got into the situation of having employer sponsored health care, where some poeple have great coverage and others have none.

In case you missed it, there was a very interesting article in the June 20, 2009 Wall Street Journal on healthcare reform. The big take away for me from this article was a physican making the point, in print, in a major publication, that healthcare costs need to decrease. Not just increase more slowly, but decrease, in order to make healthcare reform affordable. The author, Abraham Verghese, busts a couple of myths about some of the cost containment strategies (prevention and electronic medical records) curently being proposed, but does not necessarily come up with any new solutions.  

 A highly recommended read regardless of your political persuasion.

The big news in my world this week is that Chuck Briggs is retiring. Most people involved in cost reporting know Chuck’s company even if they don’t now Chuck personally. Chuck started Health Financial Systems (HFS) in 1982. At the time I was doing cost report preparation work for a “Big Eight” accounting firm. We started using Chuck’s software in about 1983 on then ”state of the art” IBM personal computers. If my memory serves me correctly they had no hard drive and 128KB (yes K not M) of memory.

In the beginning Chuck was pretty much the whole company. You could call him at 8:30 a.m. east coast time and he was already at work in his California office. And he was always pleasant and helpful, even at that hour of the morning.  Obviously he was very successful, as HFS came to be the dominate provider of Medicare cost report software. Reportedly Chuck is planning on spending more time in his garden, and will still be consulting with HFS on an as needed basis.

So best wishes Chuck! We hope that you enjoy a well deserved retirement!

Welcome!

They say timing is everything. Well that could be very true in this case. For most Medicare cost report preparers this time of year is the beginning of busy season. Not exactly the best time to start a new blog.  So please forgive me if posts are few and far between for the next few months.

Our goal for the journal is to provide a forum to discussing issues related to healthcare finance, primarily cost report related. But having spent several decades working in and observing healthcare finance, of course I have an opinion on how to “fix” what most would now agree is a broken system for delivering healthcare.

Please feel free to contact me by responding here, or by using the contact pages on the main CostReports web site.  And stay tuned for more.