Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...centers in the age of managed care. "It was like a cloudburst," admits Keith Arnold, Sierra Tucson's director of marketing. "It decimated the business. We've changed our marketing strategy and now go after the self-paying"--read rich--"client." These days, it is difficult to get in-patient coverage at all for detoxification. "The number of in-patient treatment programs has declined precipitously," says Monica Oss, editor of Open Minds, a behavioral-health-industry newsletter. "Between 1988 and 1993, the average number of patient bed days dropped from...
...forced to reinvent themselves. In 1994 the Hartford Institute of Living, in Connecticut, merged with Hartford Hospital to avoid extinction. The nonprofit giants, the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, and the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota, have both increased the amount of financial aid they offer to needy patients. McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusets, a 185-year-old Harvard-affiliated facility, long ago famous as a haven for addled and addicted Brahmins, has seen its average patient stay drop from 57 days to 14 since 1989 and now fills 70% of its beds with Medicaid and Medicare patients...
Betty Ford Center president John Schwarzlose says it is routine to receive a call from the patient's managed-care company after five to eight days. Is the patient ambulatory? they want to know. Is he or she doing better? Then the struggle begins. Some companies refuse to divulge their benefit criteria, which also vary from plan to plan and state to state. "Our physicians talk to their physicians," says Schwarzlose. "Then we call the patient in to see our financial counselors," because, increasingly, the insurer's response to continuing inpatient addiction treatment, he explains, is to "just...
...wrong treatment choice can carry real risks. Silver Hill's Sheehy tells a story about an alcoholic patient who attended four to six hours of therapy a day, then retired to a nearby inn each night. One evening the patient bought a bottle of Jack Daniel's on his way home from the clinic, got drunk, then fell down the stairs, nearly crashing through a window. And for many addicts, detoxification is only the beginning of treatment. Often, substance abuse overlays a more serious psychiatric problem that needs lengthy treatment. In a short stay, says Jerry Spicer, president of Hazelden...
...next round. Thousands of federal employees were to be laid off at midnight Friday, for the third time in as many months, until both sides made eleventh-hour concessions. The House on Thursday passed a bill to keep the government running through March 15. "We've got to be patient; you don't always get what you want," said freshman Republican Representative Mark Foley, a member of the renegade class which had previously refused to compromise. And despite the fact that there are program cutbacks in the bill that the Democrats don't like, including a $3.1 billion...