Barnes: Parkview facility fee and House Bill 23-1215
Health care expenses are complex and often confusing. But we can all understand the desire to keep costs down without sacrificing services or access to quality care.
Unfortunately, a misguided bill currently making its way through the Colorado State Legislature will do just the opposite – reducing access to care, closing outpatient departments, laying off health care workers, and driving up health care costs and the cost of insurance for all of us.
If successful, House Bill 23-1215 would imperil vital outpatient services that are provided at various locations throughout Parkview Health System by eliminating the “facility fees'' used to pay for the dedicated staff members who care for patients.
While facility fees are nothing new, they are often misunderstood and arguably misnamed. They should probably be called “patient care fees,” or “people fees,” because they have almost nothing to do with a physical facility and almost everything to do with the care patients receive in a health care outpatient setting. While professional fees cover the cost of physicians and physician assistants, facility fees cover all the people needed to make these services run: From nurses to lab and X-ray technicians to parking attendants, security, and pharmacy staff members. Facility fees pay for the people who care for people.
Facility fees are not the same as “surprise bills” and have been held to strict transparency standards by state and federal governments since they were introduced in 2013. The fee is charged when a hospital owns an outpatient department but may or may not employ the physicians working there. That can include anything from radiology centers to cancer centers, surgery centers, or similar facilities.
These are not easy times for many hospitals, particularly in Pueblo and the rural areas. More than half of the state’s hospitals are currently operating at unsustainable financial margins even with these fees.
Eliminating facility fees will slash an additional $9 billion a year from the budgets of hospital-owned outpatient departments and clinics across the state and threaten the financial viability of 96% of hospitals in Colorado – with exponential impacts passed on to low-income residents, seniors, underserved populations, and rural communities. It will also drastically cut care options for those with Medicare and Medicaid coverage, just as it will push all patients away from the convenient, integrated, preventative care they currently receive and toward costlier in-patient and emergency room treatments, farther from home and with significantly longer wait times.
The goal of health care is to keep patients healthy. Providing preventive care in accessible outpatient departments has helped Colorado reduce health care costs while doing just that. Colorado currently ranks in the top three states with the lowest percent of household income spent on hospital care, as well as for avoidable hospital use and cost. The lost access to outpatient care departments and providers resulting from HB-1215 will increase emergency room visits and drive up health care costs for all.
We learned during the coronavirus pandemic how swiftly our hospitals and ERs can be overwhelmed, and we are still recovering from staffing shortages due to the exhaustion and burnout that ensued. But we were here for the community then, and we must continue to invest in our workforce to ensure that we will be here in the future.
HB23-1215 does nothing but undermine that investment, and in turn, your health care, and our community. It promises tens of thousands of job losses, forces hundreds of outpatient departments out of business and compromises the integrated care model that patients desire, legislature supports, and the entire state benefits from. In short, HB23-1215 is catastrophic for health care in Colorado.
The accounting here is not complicated: Colorado health care simply cannot afford HB23-1215. I urge you to contact your local representatives at the state legislature today and ask them to vote no on this bill.
Leslie Barnes is the president and CEO of Parkview Health System
This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Barnes: Parkview facility fee and House Bill 23-1215
