A consortium of healthcare providers met with President Obama yesterday and pledged to cut costs by as much as 2-trillion dollars as part of health care reform. A local hospital CEO downplayed that announcement today.
Wayne Smith is CEO of Franklin-based Community Health Systems. He says he doesn’t expect much to come of the group’s commitment. He says the only likely reform to happen this year is health coverage for the uninsured. Smith says it would be easiest to expand the government’s existing program for the poor.
“Who has the ability to manage the uninsured population? It’s probably the Medicaid programs across the country. They already got the resources in place, the administration in place to do this. You probably don’t have to put much more in that. If you create another big public entity up here you’re talking about zillions of dollars to manage all that so there is a way to do that.”
Community Health Systems was one of several Nashville-area health care companies presenting at Bank of America’s 2009 health care conference in New York this week. CHS is the largest publicly-traded hospital company in the US, a moniker it gained after HCA went private in 2006.
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