Hospitals prepare report for Obama/Biden on Health Concerns

http://www.timesdaily.com/article/20081228/ARTICLES/812280321/1011/NEWS?Title=Hospitals_prepare_report_for_Obama_on_health_concerns

Officials at Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Florence and Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield will host a meeting Monday to discuss issues that directly affect local health-care facilities.

The event, which will be at the Shoals Chamber of Commerce, was organized as a result of a request by the Obama-Biden transition team and Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Tom Daschle of hospitals to identify specific challenges and then submit them by Dec. 31.

Carl Bailey, chief executive officer at ECM, said the issues he expects to come up during the meeting are uninsured patients and universal coverage.

"The issue is if health care is a right or if it is a privilege," Bailey said. "Both candidates were pretty plain when they ran, and it's my understanding that President-elect Obama said that it is a right, and that's not what we heard from the other side."

He also said there are issues specific to hospitals in the Shoals, including the lack of fairness in the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement system as well as who should be responsible for covering costs incurred by patients who don't have insurance.

Organizations were given just 15 days to organize and have these meetings, and, despite the rush, Bailey said he's optimistic the voices of people in the Shoals will be heard.

"If we don't say it, we can't be heard," he said. "We were required to have them in groups of 20 or less, but it's probably the toughest time of year to get something like this together."

In addition to Bailey and Bill Anderson, CEO at Keller, community leaders are expected to attend, including doctors, bankers and elected officials.

John Podesta, co-chairman of the transition team, authored the memo and, in it, he wrote that Obama and Daschle are "counting on Americans from every walk of life to identify what's broken and provide ideas for how to fix it."

Michelle Rupe Eubanks can be reached at 740-5745 or michelle.eubanks@TimesDaily.com.





Hopefully this will lead to some real fixes for Healthcare in this country.

not part of the dialog? We all have seen first hand how the bankers and the CEOs in our country operate. In addition to Bailey and Bill Anderson, CEO at Keller, community leaders are expected to attend, including doctors, bankers and elected officials.

..... like the hospitals are. It's hard to include "the people" if "the people" are an unorganized mass of millions of people. We need some kind of "Concerned Citiznes for the Reform of Health Care" or something. Is there anything like that? And how did they ever agree to a concensus?

like a request from hospitals to get their side of the story...
what they see as the challenges....

and from this thread....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=8039031
it looks like the same is happening on the people's side....
meetings across the country, via change.gov, for consumer's input.

Barack said over and over during his campaign that all would have a seat at the table....
and that the proceedings would be transparent...

the house parties and from the other side as well. I'm confident things will change for the better under this administration.