Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

Too many government regulations and unreasonable expectations from patients and their families are among the leading reasons for the high costs of health care, hospital officials said today during a roundtable discussion called by the chairwoman of the House Health and Human Services Committee.

Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita, has been holding a series of the informal meetings with the goal of learning what is driving the ever increasing costs of medicine. Last week the discussion included representatives of health insurance companies.

Friday, she heard from a panel of about two dozen people, most of them hospital administrators.

“I hope what you’re hearing is it’s not providers adding to the cost,” said Bryant Anderson, administrator of the Anthony Medical Center. “It’s not us. It’s the regulations and the things we have to buy.”

As an example of the high cost of doing business, Anderson said he had to pay $320 per hour to have a technician repair some of his hospital’s laboratory equipment.

“Do you know any doctor who makes that much per hour?” he asked. “Somehow we need some help with the inputs and we have to be allowed to run our business.”

Anderson and other said government regulations written and enforced by people with legal but no health care experience resulted in mounds of paperwork for hospitals while requiring additional people on staff just to assure regulatory compliance.

Others at the meeting complained that television shows and the Internet left patients with the sense that doctors and hospitals could work miracles or that they knew better than the health professionals how to deal with their problems.

“The survival rate for Code Blues in hospitals is around 4 percent,” said Dr. Timothy Williamson of the University of Kansas Hospital. “But on TV it’s about 80 percent. The public has a very skewed perception of what can be done.”

Code Blue is hospital lingo for a patient in immediate need of resuscitation.

Members of the group talked at length about expensive but futile end-of-life care for patients who could not accept the inevitability of death.

Randy Peterson of Via Christi said the reimbursement system doesn’t pay for doctors to provide “end-of-life” counseling.

Dennis George, administrator at Coffey County Hospital, said patients will research their conditions on the Internet and then, “they’ll bring in a stack of papers two or three inches thick and say ‘Doctor, this is what I think we’ve got to do.’

“Doctors are not being trained to say no,” he said. “How do we change the habits and expectations of consumers?”

Linda Harrison, president of Promise Regional Medical Center in Hutchinson said “we have a new generation of doctors. They want a life. So, we have to have bylaws to induce physicians to take calls in ER. They don’t want to do it and they certainly don’t want to do it without compensation.”

Vicki Caywood, Promise Regional Medical Center’s compliance director, said the government was “running amok with regulations.

“That’s a big part of the problem today,” she said.

Dale White, administrator for Horton Community Hospital, said if there were “universal access” to affordable health care he could reduce his charges by 25 percent, “tomorrow.”

White said his hospital was seeing a growing amount of debt because of patients who had health insurance but could not afford their co-payments or deductibles. The hospital is then stuck with the costs, which it must build into rates for those who can afford to pay.