Historic financial decline hits doctors, dentists and hospitals, threatening overall economy

[Zorro]

Even as the novel coronavirus pandemic draws attention and resources to the nation’s doctors and hospitals, the health-care industry is suffering a historic collapse in business that is emerging as one of the most powerful forces hurting the U.S. economy and a threat to a potential recovery.

The widespread economic shutdown deployed to reduce transmission of the coronavirus hit hospitals and health-care providers with particular force as they prepared to face the pandemic.

Most elective surgeries nationwide were postponed beginning in mid-March. Dentists offices were closed. Physicians stopped seeing all but the sickest patients in their offices. Stay-at-home orders didn’t just prevent people from dining in restaurants — they led people to avoid medical services, too, amid concerns about the virus’s disease, covid-19. More than 200 hospitals, including Children’s National Hospital in Washington, have furloughed workers, according to a tally by Becker’s Hospital Review.

The result was that health-care spending declined at an annualized rate of 18 percent in the first three months of the year, according to Commerce Department data released last week, the largest reduction since the government started keeping records in 1959.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/04/financial-distress-among-doctors-hospitals-despite-covid-19-weighs-heavily-economy/

[3catwoman3]

1. Absolutely true. Since June of 1996, I have worked at a pediatric...

...office as the one nurse practitioner amongst 9 doctors. The practice has 3 locations. I work in only one of them. There are usually 2 of us seeing patients in each office on weekdays and one on Saturday mornings, averaging approx. 160 a week in each office.

The first couple of weeks of March, there was a minor decline - 145 patients a week

Things tanked the week of March 16th - average of 76 patients per week in each office

Week of March 23rd - average of 65 patients per week in each office

My employers did not wait long. I was notified on March 20th, at the end of the work day, that they could not afford to keep me on the payroll and I should not show up the next week. A week later, a formal furlough notice for a minimum of 6 weeks was declared, in a phone call and followed with an email, with the plan to contact me in week 5 to "reassess future needs."

Week 5 has come and gone, and the only contact there has been was publishing of the May calendar, which I am not on, so that is a fairly broad hint that the furlough has been extended thru May. No email, no phone call, no text message.

The receptionists have been told to tell moms who ask to schedule with me that I am temporarily "flexing down" my schedule due to COVID-19. Makes it sound like it was my choice, which kinds pisses me off, because it definitely was not.