WASHINGTON — One of the health bill concessions won by Sen. Ben Nelson clears the way for a new $150 million Bellevue hospital set to open in April.
The Bellevue Medical Center is a joint venture involving the Nebraska Medical Center, the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s physicians’ group and other local doctors.
That partnership means the hospital runs afoul of the health care bill’s ban on Medicare payments to any new physician-owned hospitals. It would be difficult, even impossible, for the Bellevue hospital to operate without those payments.
The Senate health care bill includes a grandfather clause for physician-owned hospitals that have obtained a Medicare provider agreement by Feb. 1, but it was unclear whether the Bellevue facility would have been able to receive its agreement in time.
So Nelson successfully pushed to include a 6-month extension of the grandfather clause in the Senate bill.
Bellevue Medical Center CEO Marty Carmody said he’s confident the facility will obtain its agreement by the new Aug. 1 deadline.
It’s a high-stakes issue for Bellevue Medical Center, which has paid lobbyists in Washington about $60,000 through the first nine months of 2009 to press its case on Capitol Hill.
“We clearly benefit from that” extension of the grandfather clause, Carmody said. “This community’s going to benefit from it.”
The hospital, in the works for several years, will serve the large, fast-growing Bellevue area and the Offutt Air Force Base community, as well as other communities in southeast Nebraska and southwest Iowa.
“There’s a real opportunity here with the effort that’s been put in to bring services to people that otherwise are traveling outside of their area in order to get them,” Carmody said.
The hospital will offer emergency care, intensive care and other medical services. The facility also will offer inpatient care — which hasn’t been available at the area’s other medical facility, Ehrling Bergquist Clinic on Offutt Air Force Base, since 2005.
Nelson, D-Neb., has been criticized by Republicans and some constituents for these kinds of deals in the health care bill.
In the case of the Bellevue hospital, Nelson said he didn’t think it was fair that the facility might be penalized by bureaucratic delays in Washington.
Hospital representatives said that Nelson’s work on the issue represented dedicated service to constitutents, and they pointed out that the Bellevue hospital is not the only one that will benefit from the extension.
Molly Sandvig, executive director of the Physician Hospitals of America, said that the extension could help about 30 facilities now under construction and that Nelson was not the only lawmaker pushing for it.
“Nelson was in the right place at the right time,” she said. “However, there were other senators that were helpful.”
Critics say that physician-owned hospitals represent inherent conflicts of interest and that physicians tend to build specialty hospitals that cherry-pick well-insured, healthier patients who require more lucrative procedures. Poor and uninsured patients are then dumped into the emergency rooms of community hospitals.
The Bellevue hospital has maintained that it’s a unique facility, however. Although partially owned by doctors, it is also a full-service community hospital. Backers of the hospital have portrayed its ownership arrangement as a model for others to emulate.
Carmody said the facility is nearing completion and will soon be hiring and training almost 400 people to serve patients.
“We’re very pleased at how this has worked,” Carmody said. “This is a big deal for the community.”
Contact the writer:
202-662-7270, joe.morton@owh.com
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