Why are some hospitals in Connecticut in financial trouble? Some of it is their own fault — they pay their executives and other employees too much. But part of it is public policy, too.
Though all but one of Connecticut’s hospitals are nonprofit community institutions, state government taxes them and recently reduced substantially the financial aid they are given for treating the indigent. While many hospital workers are unionized, their unions don’t have a fraction of the political influence of municipal teacher unions, whose members receive most of the money state government appropriates as “aid to education.” Since they are not as numerous and politically active as unionized teachers, hospital workers and most other workers are expendable to state government.
The legislation passed by the General Assembly this month defaulted on the hospitals’ financial trouble and cleared the way for their acquisition by national hospital conglomerates whose first objective is profitability. That profitability will arise from industry consolidation, loss of competition, and the shifting of corporation and municipal property taxes into bills to patients and insurers.
It was as if state government couldn’t think of anything else to do. But there were alternatives to forfeiting community control of the hospitals.
• State financial aid to hospitals has been reduced substantially over the last year on the premise that, under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government would start paying more for care of indigent patients. Maybe this will happen eventually but it’s not happening yet. Reductions in state aid should have been delayed until more federal money showed up.
• The state tax on hospitals could have been cut or eliminated.
• And since state government continues to fund so much hospital care, state law could have conditioned state aid on control of hospital salaries. After all, nine hospital chief executives in Connecticut are paid a million dollars or more per year, and many others earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. The state aid law could have developed some metric restraining employee salaries as well, at least until hospitals regained solvency.
But the legislature found what it considered more compelling uses for the money than public health, like raises for state and municipal employees.
Because of state government’s abdication, community control of hospitals will slip away over the next decade, along with competition in the hospital business.
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In its decision the other day involving former Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim, Connecticut’s Supreme Court suggested that some demonstration of remorse should be a prerequisite for reinstating a disbarred lawyer. Ganim, convicted in federal court in 2003 for extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from city contractors while he was mayor, has never conceded guilt or made an apology, though most observers of his trial felt that the evidence was overwhelming.
While Connecticut may be lucky that Ganim’s incorrigibility will keep him from returning to the practice of law, the state may not be so lucky with a standard that felonious lawyers may return to a position of honor if they are sorry enough. That is, of course, if the office of commissioner of the Superior Court — the formal public office held by lawyers — really is to remain a position of honor.
Until 25 years ago Connecticut had a better standard. Lawyers who committed felonies were disbarred for good. But then the Supreme Court reversed precedent to reinstate a lawyer who had driven drunk, killed someone, and lied about it to the police, and this reversal signaled to lawyers throughout the state that a felony was no longer a career-ending move. The General Assembly might restore the old standard by statute if it wasn’t so dominated by lawyer-legislators hedging their bets.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.