Healthcare Administrators Forced to Choose Between Patients and Employers

Healthcare employees find themselves deciding or solving ethical dilemmas each day. Administrative responsibilities mainly include: 1) Ensuring company policies and regulations are up to date, implemented, and enforced, 2) Enforcing company and position codes of ethics, 3) following city, county, state, and federal laws, 4. Patient complaints. Administrative employees often find themselves between the patients and the organization. The patient’s rights to safety, education, and healthare most important. Yet, with a slow economy, impending depression, and healthcare cut backs, some administration staff might awake in the midst of an ethical battle which go against company codes. High costs of healthcare, health insurance, and health practices, are forcing healthcare organizations to reject certain insurances from patient’s and employees, turning them away. Additionally, high costs are demanding organizations and state health insurance plans to limit healthcare provisions to the poor populations.

Most all Americans have been affected by the cutting of costs in healthcare. Those who pay escalating insurance premiums to their detriment, as the primary provider no longer accepts the insurance, and Medicare patients, are directly impacted. But, financial impacts of healthcare cut-backs are not limited to patients. Healthcare organizations have had to cut costs in many ways like closing satellite offices, purchasing smaller established buildings, relocating rural offices, downsizing staff, and limiting services.

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          Sadly, even healthcare organizations are rejecting the very insurance which was once a benefit of employment. In a rare and controversial approach to securing funds a New York Hospital, “St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital” made the “financial decision” to “stop[ed] accepting the plan, accessed through Group Health Inc., because payments are chronically late and service is poor” (Livermore, 2008).While this decision did not come easy for the organization, employees receive the blunt end; Losing a benefit, a health coverage, and a chosen provider. “Many of the workers have had to find new doctors, since their previous physicians are affiliated with St. Luke’s and would not be able to treat them.”

Patients are experiencing the most pressure from the cost cutting scene due to the limiting of delivery of healthcare. Some healthcare cuts are age and class discriminatory. “South Carolina has cut treatment for low-income women under 40 with breast or cervical cancer and stopped providing nutritional supplements for people with kidney failure (Levev, 2009). One of Nevada’s public hospitals discontinued cancer treatments to the uninsured. According to “Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California . . .  we are unraveling the safety net to the point where it may not be possible to stitch it back together again.”

 While President Barrack Obama has a healthcare reform initiative currently in process with house representatives that “controls the skyrocketing cost of health care” (White House, 2009) redistributes money, cut prices in care and insurance, and promises “savings of more than $500 billion over 10 years [that] will strengthen Medicare” making basic care more affordable, some think it “may not be enough to restore services being eliminated in the burgeoning crisis” (Levev, 2009). Before a large scale reform was on the table a smaller scale “stimulus package that could include as much as $100 billion to bail out Medicaid . . . which could extend coverage to an additional 4 million low-income children.”

In conclusion, healthcare administrative employees have been placed in the middle of an ethical battle between patient and provider due to the healthcare cut-backs limiting care services and insurance acceptance. While the health care reform initiative may offer affordable basic healthcare services and lower the cost of insurance premiums, saving possible millions in the next decade, and improving healthcare’s future; it may be too late to save services lost today. Some say the healthcare reform will come too late and too far off to save the services lost today. Losing ground so far back is a scary thought. There are bound to be more ethical issues resulting from further losses until a solution takes hold. The healthcare Administrative staff will continue to be placed between the patient and the organization until this is achieved.