PRINCETON AREA: Hospital executives share their visions

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   Health care costs are “out of control” amid political uncertainty about the future of President Barack Obama’s health care reform was a message coming out of a health care forum last week.
   ”The 800 pound gorilla in the room is the affordable care act,” said Neil Sullivan, assistant commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance at Mercer County College. “We are five weeks away from a presidential election between a president who considers it his signature legislation and a contender who vows to dismantle it if elected.”
   This was the second year that the Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce had a symposium on health care, but the first since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the health care reform or “Obama Care” was constitutional. A panel of executives from five area hospitals weighed in with their thoughts on the law and its impact.
   Skip Ciminio, president and CEO of Robert Wood Johnson Hospital at Hamilton, said he had thought the nation’s high court would uphold the law.
   ”Now that the Supreme Court has made its ruling, I do think that there are aspects of the act — beyond the individual mandate — that will continue in place,” he said.
   For example, he said that he doubted that whichever party controls Washington will “repeal coverage for children up to age 26.”
   ”When we think about the Supreme Court’s decision and the elections, we think all that could happen the changes could be accelerated a bit or decelerated a bit. But the direction’s not going to change,” said Barry Rabner, president and CEO of University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro. “And the kind of strategies that are laid out in the affordable care act have a lot good solutions in them.”
   ”Everything’s that come out of this act focuses on the economics of health care,” said Darlene Hanley, president of St. Lawrence Rehabilitation Center. “And once again the industry will adjust to that.”
   Al Maghazehe, president and CEO of Capital Health, said health care costs are increasing and “out of control.”
   ”This country cannot afford those costs any longer,” he said. “And as leaders, as providers, we need to come up with solutions and not let others decide solutions for us.”
   Mr. Rabner, speaking afterward, addressed a question about there being too few doctors to treat many more people now covered under the health care law.
   ”There are a lot of predictions about the shortage, and many of them are based on some assumptions around reimbursement,” he said. “I think there’s more demand for primary care physicians because we’ve sort of shifted in how we deliver care to a lot of it being by people going directly to specialists. And there’s a belief that we can provide better care and better coordinated care with better involvement of primary care physicians.”
   In his remarks, Mr. Sullivan noted there are fewer health insurance carriers in the market than there were in the late 1990s, either due to them dropping out of the market or consolidating.
   ”That’s a trend that concerns us. To have a viable market, we need competition,” he said. “We need carriers who are competing for business. And that’s something we need to watch no matter what we do going forward.”