Last week Rachael alerted us that since St. Mary’s took over Baptist hospital system, Babtist will no longer be offering women tubal ligations.
Early this year, I posted on the Knoxville, TN merger of the city’s Baptist Hospital into St. Mary’s (a Catholic system) and the resulting end of access to tubal ligation and vasectomy at Baptist. Access to tubal ligation is now being eliminated at a Nashville, TN Baptist facility as well, as WKRN reports – Baptist Women’s Treatment Center will no longer offer tubal ligation after the end of this year.
WKRN also reports that this change “comes six years after Baptist Hospital and Middle Tennessee Medical Center stopped offering the procedure,” because “the hospitals were acquired by Saint Thomas Health Services, a Catholic health ministry, in 2002.”
Additionally, in comments, I noted that of the 5 major health insurances carriers in TN, I found the exclusions for two insurers, BCBSTN and Aetna. Neither of these health care insurers cover pregnancy except as a separate rider, although Aetna notes pregnancy complications are covered without the extra rider. This basically leaves women in the state of TN uncovered for preganacy — effectively, tens of thousands of dollars will have to be paid out of pocket if you do not have the separate rider and find yourself unexpectedly pregnant. Do check your own states, if you are still of child-bearing age and are sexually active, you may want to make sure you have that rider just in case. Oh, and don’t expect your health insurance to kick in to help you pay for an “elective” abortion — that’s on the exclusion lists also, at least for health insurers of TN women.
Today, Rachel notes that a Nashville hospital will stop delivering babies.
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.
After Sept. 1, the four-physician Genesis Women’s Care plans to consolidate its practice to deliver only at StoneCrest Medical Center in Smyrna.
The suspension of obstetrics services could affect about 50 employees at Southern Hills — staff members who the hospital said would have a chance to transfer to other job openings there or within the TriStar Health System. Southern Hills is part of TriStar, which represents hospitals flagged as part of HCA’s area operations.
Southern Hills delivers about 600 babies a year compared with more than 7,000 deliveries annually at Nashville market leader Baptist Hospital.
The actual article does not say why the group of doctors resigned, however it intimates a link to lack of profit. I guess that is the conclusion we are supposed to make without any actual reportage. That could make sense, when you take into consideration that Southern Hills Medical Center is in a round-about way, part of HCA, which is a Frist-family operation.
The Frists are no friends of women, unless it is profitable. In fact, HCA made it’s billions by:
Raiding nonprofit hospitals, dumping the poor previously served and turning them into profit mills for the family bottom line. See here. Oh yeah, and massive fraud against the Medicare system, a fact that led to a $745 million criminal fine against the company back in 2000.
I see, now. Southern Hills supplies services to a “diverse community.” Code for largely Hispanic? We might guess as much as the Tennessean article quotes Yuri Cunza, president of the Nashville Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
It seems that HCA is up to it’s old tricks — fuck the poor, fuck women, it’s all about mo’money.
I have become convinced that over the long term, it is not possble to run a consistently profitable chain of hospitals. The right owner/manager can run a single hospital or a small regional hospital group at a small profit for a long time. You can run non-profit hospitals — either singly or as a chain — almost indefinitely assuming good management. But profitable delivery of healthcare “does not scale” to large organizations. There are simply too many people who want to be paid, and too many facilities that have expenses. Somewhere, something has to give: either quality of care/facilities suffers, or accounting gimicks come into play. Sometimes both.
I could have just said “One more skirmish on the War Against Women,” and it would be true. Imagine if they said they would no longer perform vascectomies!
Shortwoman, the Catholic owned Baptist hospital chain (can’t remember their new name, but no one I knows around here goes by the new name) no longer performs vasectomies, either.
Now Fristy’s/HCA operation I can’t speak to on vasectomies.
Well, at least they are equal opportunity anti-sex nutcases.