Grady to hospitals: Do ‘fair share’

New Grady hospital CEO Michael Young fired a shot across the bows of metro Atlanta hospitals Friday, saying they should stop sending their uninsured patients to Grady.

“I think the other hospitals need to do a gut check on their missions, and see if they’re doing their fair share,” he said during a news conference Friday.

“They need to step up and treat every patient the same, rich or poor, insured or not,” Young said.

The practice of sending these nonpaying patients to Grady has gone on for years, Young said, and is a major problem contributing to Grady’s multimillion-dollar deficit.

If it continues, he said, the hospital may not survive.

Having taken office on Tuesday, Young showed his willingness to attack a charged topic right off the bat.

“These other hospitals are [nonprofit] tax-exempt organizations, and both the state and federal government are giving them tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks,” he said. He declined to identify any hospital.

Officials from several area hospitals denied that they dump patients on Grady.

“We don’t dump patients. We don’t send patients to Grady,” said Lynn Peterson, spokeswoman for St. Joseph’s Hospital in Atlanta. “If a patient arrives at St. Joseph’s, they are taken care of here.”

Grady is considered the largest, busiest and most financially troubled public hospital in the state. The hospital treats many uninsured people and loses upward of $40 million a year providing this uncompensated care, Grady officials said. The hospital was close to closing last year when it ran a deficit of $43 million.

Young opened a can of worms that has created debate for years in metro Atlanta. The dumping of patients to another hospital raises concerns about ethics and potentially violates a federal law against the practice. Beyond that, a patient who does not receive proper treatment at a hospital that also tells them to go elsewhere could be the basis of a malpractice lawsuit.

Young said he believes some of these patients sent to Grady are not receiving proper treatment elsewhere, before being sent to Grady. He said he spent 20 hours in the Grady emergency room this week, and was struck by the “high number of those patients who started elsewhere.”

He spoke of one patient from Stone Mountain. He said the patient had been at another hospital, and the treatment was not complete. “They were uninsured,” he said.

Nettie Klein, administrative director of emergency services at Piedmont Hospital, said, “We are required to provide urgent care when they present at the door.”

Sometimes a patient is transferred to Grady for a specialty service, such as Grady’s burn clinic, she said.

Officials at Emory Crawford Long Hospital and Emory University Hospital also said they do not dump patients on Grady. But it is possible for a patient to end up at Grady for follow-up care, if that is more convenient for the patient, said Dr. Kate Heilpern, the Emory official who oversees the emergency rooms at Crawford Long, Emory and Grady.

She noted that if the patient lives in Fulton or DeKalb, they may pay less, or even nothing, by attending a Grady clinic versus one elsewhere.

The Rev. Tim McDonald, a leader of the advocacy group called the Grady Coalition, said he has spoken to uninsured patients who told him they had been sent to Grady from another hospital. He praised Young’s “courageousness” in raising the topic. But McDonald said such debate has surfaced in the past, with little results. He believes nothing short of state intervention will stop the dumping.