Why are so many psychiatric units facing shut down?
Dr. Paul Summergrad: Psychiatric units in both general hospitals, and there are also private psychiatric hospitals, are generally underpaid for their services compared to the cost of providing care. And that becomes very challenging to provide care, if you’re constantly losing money on the care of those services. So generally speaking, psychiatric units are not money makers in hospitals. Is that generally speaking or is that pretty much across the board? I think that’s pretty much across the board. You know, if you look at the way in which hospitals are reimbursed, care generally falls into three or four different buckets in terms of who pays for care: Medicare, Medicaid and then the commercial insurers, and then there’s a smaller component of free care in the state because of health care reform. Both Medicare and Medicaid may roughly cover the costs of care or lose a little bit, but the amount of patients who are cared for under Medicaid is relatively small, and then hospitals make up
