Indiana legislators' plan to give hospital leaders until April to come up with their own strategy for reducing high healthcare costs in the state will likely lead to them slashing already low employee salaries, pediatric emergency physician Mercy Hylton, MD, wrote in a March 3 IndyStar op-ed.
Indiana is among the five states with the highest hospital costs, and the hospitals already pay lower wages to healthcare workers and have worse health outcomes than the national average, according to Dr. Hylton.
Dr. Hylton recommended that the Indiana General Assembly should:
1. Create fair competition by using antitrust regulations for the state's big health systems and enforcing price transparency rules.
2. Provide more scrutiny over the community benefits nonprofit health systems receive and restore certificates of need for large health system facilities in the state.
3. Define medicine practice from nonphysician practitioners and obligate truth and transparency in healthcare practitioner identification.
4. End in- and out-of-network differences for acute care, for which patients don't have any control over where and when they receive it.
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