Word: sicker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Patients now require more attention outside the intensive-care unit as well. As part of a long overdue campaign to control soaring medical costs, most patients are released from the hospital faster, but the ones who remain are sicker -- and usually older. The number of elderly patients has almost doubled in the past two decades. Result: more nurses are needed for fewer patients...
...take up 9% of all available hospital beds. "Caring for AIDS patients is different from caring for any other sick person, make no mistake," says Donna Stidham, a senior nurse at the 20-bed AIDS unit of Sherman Oaks Community Hospital in Los Angeles. These patients tend to be sicker, their illnesses less predictable and their families more difficult to handle. Experimental treatments require close attention and study. "It's going to make everyone face the nursing shortage," says Jeanne Kalinoski, an AIDS nurse at a major New York City hospital. "If you have a heart attack in the emergency...
...haunting presence of the elderly poor, most of them widows, many of them black, collapsing into a safety net that cannot support their weight. The well-being of America's senior citizens, though far greater than 20 years ago, is by no means universal. Many are sick and getting sicker, as health care becomes prohibitively expensive. Every year, as the baby boomers age and the nation's center of gravity shifts upward, the allocation of resources becomes ever more difficult and the potential for conflict between generations ever greater...
...among hospitals. For specific DRG's, the actual resources used (days in the hospital, laboratory tests, consulations, etc.) have been found to vary enormously--often several-fold. "High cost" hospitals have been predictably criticized as wasteful, and predictably defended by others on the grounds that their patients are truly sicker in ways ignored by the DRG scheme...
Health. Because of tighter and tighter restrictions on Medicare reimbursements, hospitals are discharging many Medicare patients early --"sicker and quicker," as many doctors put it. In addition, patients this year face higher payments out of their own pockets: as much as $492 for the first day's stay, vs. $400 previously. Reagan wants to cut up to $5 billion more from health-care spending, and Congress may have to accept a figure almost as high. Part of the pain will inevitably fall on the elderly: in Reagan's proposal they would have to pay $18.70 a month in premiums...