You go to the doctor or to the hospital for some ailment and you are immediately scheduled for a battery of tests before you even get to be examined by a doctor. Why? Well, a group of health care professionals have come forward to admit that none of that is necessary and should actually be avoided and is simply done to increase profits for the hospital or Doctor’s profits.

I never even understood the concept that people say, that doctor is so good you can never get an appointment there. Well, in my opinion , If that doctor is so good then he should have an empty waiting room because all his patients are healthy and you can book an appointment on any day at your convenience. No, nowadays even if you just look about 65 years old they admit you to the hospital even if you are well hoping they can treat and bill you for some kind of ailment or test for a soon to probably happen kind of ailment.

Any doctor or billing agent that notices that there is unnecessary billing going on in a hospital somehow finds that shortly later after their revelations of unnecessary admitting to a hospital or billing of unnecessary tests, find themselves fired from their jobs. This is why health care costs so much money in this country. It is estimated that $210 Billion dollars per year, that represents about 10% of all health costs, goes towards unnecessary tests and treatments.

A big amount comes right out of the pockets of American taxpayers in the form of Medicare and Medicaid payments. Just look at the admission and billing practices of a place called Health Management Associates. It is the 4^th largest for profit hospital chain in the country with revenues of $5.8 Billion dollars last year and nearly half of that coming from Medicare and Medicaid.

Over a hundred current and former employees revealed that HMA pressured it’s doctors to admit more and more patients regardless of medical needs in order to increase profits. HMA owns 70 hospitals in 15 states. It is known to buy small struggling hospitals in non urban areas and turning them into profit centers by filling empty beds. They have empty beds because the communities there are healthy people that don’t need care. Urban areas are doing fine because there are plenty of stabbings and gun shot wounds that medicare will pay for. Those people rarely have a medical plan anyway.

Generally speaking the more patients a hospital admits, the more money it can make. It is a business stragity that HMA has aggressively pursued. Fired doctors have admitted that they were told that if they didn’t start admitting more patients to the hospital, they would loose their jobs. They were told to admit 20% of their patients for something regardless of need.

In a rural relatively limited resource community hospital, your admission rate out of the emergency room department should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%, they wanted 20%. Doctor Cliff Clunan, is a retired Cornall that spent 21 years as a Army doctor before joining the Carlyle Regional Emergency Center in Pennsylvania as the Assistant Emergency Room Director who said, “ Yes, all businesses have quotas but they are not building widgets, they are dealing with human life. You just can’t create sick people.’

The medical professionals that have not met their quotas are beginning to sue places like HMA for wrongful termination when they are fired from their jobs. Should Lawyers be kept busy suing for these type of issues? They can call it cohesion to commit fraud. Common sense should dictate that greed and profit taking has gone to a new low when the subject is not an item but a human life.

There are thousands of documents out there showing unnecessary tests and admissions to hospitals. It is institutionalized that the medical employees must find billable reasons to keep patients there. The control over patients and doctors and hospital staff is even being enforced by computer software called Pro-Med that is installed in every emergency room.

HMA says the computer software Pro-Med is designed to improve the quality of patient care. Doctors, nurses, emergency room directors and hospital administrators have spoken out and said HMA customized the program to automatically order an extensive battery of tests , many of them unnecessary as soon as a patient walks into the emergency room. So, good luck trying to stop the assault on your body.