For cancer patient Norma Cornell, the contract agreement Friday between UnitedHealthcare and HCA came at a good time.
Had it continued, the dispute would have forced the 55-year-old Aurora resident to find a surgeon outside HCA- HealthOne’s Swedish Medical Center, delaying an operation she hoped to have done this month.
“I feel more at ease,” she said of the news.
Relief was a reaction that doctors as well as patients described.
“There was a lot of stress on everybody these last two months. It was a difficult time, and I am glad it was resolved,” said Dr. Mark Linkow, a gastroenterologist at HCA-HealthOne’s Rose Medical Center in Denver.
For two months, those insured through United could not use HCA facilities without paying much higher out-of-network charges. Now HCA is back in the United network.
Linkow had to see his United patients at Exempla’s St. Joseph Hospital in Denver. He had to gain admitting privileges at Exempla to work at its hospitals.
The dislocation was hard on medical staff and patients alike. Some nurses who weren’t seeing enough work at HealthOne facilities hired on with other hospitals.
Effectively, about 30 to 40 percent of patients in the metro area were funneled out of the hospital group – the largest in the metro area – to find services in other hospitals that were already busy, Linkow said.
“It was like how many patients could you stuff into a Volkswagen,” he said.
Even those United-covered patients who weren’t in immediate need of care were glad about the settlement.
“All of my past treatment has been at HealthOne entities, so I would not want to be forced to seek new resources in the event I need future treatment,” said Martha Cox of Morrison. Cox criticized United and HCA.
“To me, the unwillingness of the parties to resolve their differences for such a long period of time, during which many patients were seriously impacted, is more evidence that the bottom line for insurers and the corporate health industry is money, not the well-being of their (paying) patients,” said Cox.
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-954-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
