Care of the Ventilator-Dependent Patient: Public Policy Considerations

Abstract

Because traditional cost-based reimbursement for acute hospital care has been replaced by the DRG system and other limited-payment approaches, hospital managers are seeking more cost-effective provision of care. This has shortened patient-stay periods in hospitals and increased demand for such alternatives as nursing home and private home care for chronically ill persons, including those dependent on ventilators. At the same time that hospitals seek to discharge patients earlier, patients themselves would prefer to remain in hospitals for long-term care because adequate financial coverage is not available to most of them for alternative-site care. In this setting of conflict between the financial policies of hospitals and those of Medicare and private insurance carriers, it is important to keep quality of care, not financial considerations, as the first consideration when a facility is chosen for long-term care. But the long-term patient, including the patient requiring ventilator support, is caught in the web of competing financial incentives and the fact that there is no consensus on how such care should be organized, delivered, or paid for. The only significant source of funding for long-term nursing home care is Medicaid, which requires the patient to give up his personal assets, including his home; this makes it nearly certain that he will always remain institutionalized. Private insurance carriers have not yet come to terms with the idea that long-term ventilator care can be made less expensive at sites other than hospitals—and thus many patients have no satisfactory answer to the problem of where to receive such care or how it can be financed. An effective public policy is urgently needed but notably absent, a fact that hampers the development of additional respiratory care and other long-term support programs.