Word: dunne
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...Bedford, Ind., is an odd case of capitalism in action--maybe even hyperaction. Should you get into a car wreck on Highway 50 as it passes through town, two local hospitals can send ambulances to compete for your business. If you are sufficiently alert, you can choose between Dunn Memorial Hospital and Bedford Regional Medical Center. To avoid unseemly tugs of war, the city requires that the hospitals alternate pickups of victims not well enough to state a preference. And the police are on hand to sort things out. "They'll back off when it's not their turn," Bedford...
...roadside opportunities, they are engaged in a larger struggle for the sick and elderly in this town of 15,000. Their philosophies are at opposite extremes of today's health-care debate. Bedford Regional has eagerly embraced managed care and linked itself to a statewide hospital chain. County-owned Dunn is sticking to an almost Norman Rockwell vision of traditional health care. The hospital war being waged nationally is taking place here in microcosm; it is at institutions like Dunn that traditional medicine may be making its last stand...
...that his home has no lock on the front door. But bring up hospital loyalties--an allegiance some Bedford families have solemnly passed down for three generations--and townspeople are likely to get agitated. "You don't get the care you need there," 86-year-old Martha Terrell, a Dunn patient of 50 years' standing, says of the institution she won't patronize. "Whenever anyone new moves to town, I tell them to be sure to come to Dunn...
...Services at the two hospitals overlap, and beds go empty. A study predicted that by 2001 Bedford will need only 65 beds, 95 fewer than it has now. "Those numbers are probably going to drive where we go with this whole thing," says John Birdzell, CEO of Bedford Regional. Dunn's CEO, Richard Hahn, does not disagree. "There's been a consensus that one hospital would be a good goal to strive for," he says. But over the past 15 years, four attempts to merge have failed when the two sides could not agree on whether the new hospital would...
...Dunn doctors boast that they are not tied to the controversial drug "formularies" used in managed-care to rein in doctors' drug choices. Cardiologist Ganapathy Ramanathan says he regularly prescribes a very expensive heart-attack drug called TPA, at thousands of dollars a dose, rather than the drug streptokinase, which is available for a fraction of the cost but has been found less effective in some studies. "I'm sure the hospital has lost a lot of money on many of my patients, but they've never told me about it," he says. Dunn contends it is more willing...