Facing Increasing Costs for Uncompensated Care, Denver Hospital Begins To Turn Away Non-Denver Residents

The Denver Health Medical Center is losing about $1 million each month treating indigent patients who cannot afford to pay for services and as a result has decided to stop accepting all patients who are not residents of the city and county of Denver, the Denver Rocky Mountain News reports. Hospital officials estimate the facility will spend about $25 million more this year to treat uninsured and poor patients compared to last year, or $237 million this year compared with $100 million per year in the early 1990s. The hospital provides 42% to 50% of the city's indigent care, officials said. To compensate for the increasing expense of treating the indigent, the hospital no longer will treat patients who live outside of Denver, another area in which the hospital has experienced increased costs. The expense of treating residents from outside Denver County has recently increased from $12 million to $22 million. Hospital workers now turn away nonresidents unless they require emergency treatment. The hospital also plans to take other cost-cutting measures, including increasing copayments for certain services, implementing a new computer-based program to allow doctors to order and monitor prescription drugs and negotiating better deals with suppliers. Further, the hospital has hired bilingual enrollment specialists who have helped the hospital screen twice as many patients for eligibility in public health programs such as Medicaid (Perrault, Denver Rocky Mountain News, 5/18).