Word: wesley
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kansas Heart triggered a cascade. This quiet, airy city of 540,000 already had--besides Via Christi's hospitals--the Wesley Medical Center, part of the for-profit HCA chain. Wichita now has five doctor-owned hospitals as well, along with a dozen ASCs and at least 10 free-standing diagnostic imaging centers, eight of which have physician investors. (Via Christi has a share in four of them, as it does in one ASC and a specialty hospital.) "The fear that emergency rooms and cardiovascular programs would close at community hospitals," says Duick, "has not been borne out over seven...
...competition fair? Within two years after Galichia Heart Hospital opened in Wichita in 2001, Wesley's net revenues from its cardiovascular program plummeted from a notch above $18 million to roughly $2 million. In 2003 the Kansas Spine Hospital opened, and in a year Wesley's neurosurgery revenues dropped $8.8 million, to roughly $1 million. Via Christi cardiovascular surgeries declined from 4,334 in 1998 to an estimated 2,950 this year. In that period, its executives say, the number of nonsurgically treated cardiac patients--who, say, have heart failure--remained relatively steady, around...
Hospitals are fighting back in none-too-subtle ways. Some won't let an ASC physician-investor admit patients in their wards. And powerful health systems often use their leverage to lock physician-owned competitors out of preferred networks of insurers. Via Christi owns Kansas' largest managed-care plan; Wesley has an exclusive contract in Wichita with the state's leading insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield. "It's brutal competition," says David Laird, CEO of the Heart Hospital of Austin, which competes with the Texas nonprofit Seton Medical Center. "They act like they have a halo over their heads...
...home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city's Civil Rights Institute. The institute is right across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where, in 1963, four young children - Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair - lost their lives when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded during Sunday school, and before my talk I took the opportunity to visit the church. The young pastor and several deacons greeted me at the door and showed me the still-visible scar along the wall...
Favorite childhood activity: Playing dress-up with my next-door neighbor, Wesley...