Image Credit: Ballad Health / Facebook
The Tennessee Conservative Staff –
Tennessee officials are one step closer to changes that would force Ballad Health to make improvements to its quality-of-care or risk the disbanding of their current monopoly.
Documents show that negotiations have been in the works to modify the state’s monopoly agreement with Ballad, who is currently the largest state-sanctioned hospital monopoly in the country.
The modifications would require more accountability from the company, which has failed to meet quality-of-care standards in the six years since their agreement was approved.
According to annual reports from the Tennessee Department of Health, Ballad has failed to meet approximately 80% of the benchmarks that monitor care, including infection rate after surgery, emergency room wait times, and mortality rates.
However, the scale on which Ballad is scored annually by the state does not place a great deal of weight on those particular numbers. Because of that, Ballad has continued to receive an “A” rating each year.
That could all change, though, if negotiations proceed as the TDOH has proposed a new scoring system that would make hospital performance “the most heavily weighted” portion of the rubric.
Ballad countered that the weighting should not be raised as much, and the company should still receive points just for reporting statistics, even if they were not good.
The state also proposed that Ballad should have to meet a minimum score of 80% to be considered a “clear and convincing public advantage.” Ballad argued that they should only have to meet 70%.
A spokesperson for Ballad, however, says that the company “enthusiastically agrees that the most important thing to our patients is the quality of care they receive.”
This proposal appears to be the state’s response to years of complaints from community members about the quality-of-care received at Ballad hospitals. Last year, Ballad claimed that their quality had dropped because of strains placed on the hospitals as a result of the Coronavirus epidemic.
Ballad Health was formed in 2018, after Tennessee and Virginia officials approved a merger of several hospitals, doing so based on a Certificate of Public Advantage agreement. In exchange for being allowed to form the monopoly, Ballad agreed to put a hold on price increases and to keep hospitals open.
They also agreed to provide a certain amount of charitable health care each year, which they have failed to do each year as well. Ballad officials claim that changes to Medicare have reduced the number of people who are without insurance, making it harder for them to provide those charitable services.
