Obamacare nightmare begins as hospital workers go unpaid

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Obamacare, unpaid hospital workers, Medicare payments

(NaturalNews) For sure, most people who work in the healthcare field do so because they care about taking care of folks and making people well. But at the same time, it is the way in which they make their living, so, like the rest of us who still have a job in Obama's economy, they expect to be paid for their services.

Obamacare, however, is making it more difficult for hospital employees in some parts of the country to be paid. And why? Because as bad as government healthcare reimbursement bureaucracy was before Obamacare, the president's signature law is vastly compounding the problem - so much so that one Houston-area hospital can't pay its workers, as reported by the local ABC affiliate:

Dozens of employees at a hospital in northeast Houston have had to make it through the holidays without getting paid for weeks. The CEO of Saint Anthony's Hospital on Little York is blaming a new Medicare payment contractor for his payroll problems.

Nearly 150 employees, ranging from doctors to nurses and administrators, haven't been paid in nearly a month, and the CEO says it's not his fault.

Owed nearly $3 million

The facility is not broke, mind you - that's not the problem. Cash flow is the issue - as in, the hospital is not getting reimbursed by the government for services provided to government-insured patients:

The hospital is strapped for cash not because its not making money, but because... a new Medicare payment facilitator named Novitas Solutions is taking [way too] long to pay out Medicare claims to the hospital.

[Hospital CEO Jason Leday] says he's owed nearly $3 million in payments from Medicare and can't make payroll.

In a statement to Eyewitness News, Leday said:

"I'm very remorseful and disappointed that we can't provide paychecks for those employees. It breaks my heart."

Leday said he hasn't collected a paycheck either in nearly a year. He said he's had to give gas and grocery money to his employees from his personal bank account.

Pathetic - but the "new normal" in the age of Obamacare.

"It's been hard for everybody," Leday said. "This is a national issue that affects us locally. We are adapting to the new ways of doing business that have been created. We think we can be successful in 2013 and can take care of all of our employees through the transition."

As of press time, the ABC affiliate says the Medicare contractor, Novitas Solutions, had yet to respond to requests for comment.

Government - a history of ineptitude

The Weekly Standard reports that the contractor hasn't been around too long. In fact, the magazine reported that Novitas "also runs the south-central region's Medicare website which was launched just two days before the October 1 launch of Healthcare.gov."

And, just like the federal online exchange, Novitas' site has also been a glitch-prone disaster. So it's hard telling who among the site's enrollees is actually enrolled, and who has actually paid for their enrollment - and where the money has gone.

As Natural News has reported - often - all of this was foreseen. The idea that the federal government could take over one-sixth of the U.S. economy and do so properly, efficiently and effectively was folly from the start. A government that can't run a profitable mail delivery service, that pays 100 times more for a hammer and toilet seat than such items are worth, that consistently wastes hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and that cannot build a ship or fighter plane without massive cost overruns and delays - cannot "run" a healthcare system for 300-plus million people.

Folks who support Obamacare - especially those in the administration - keep saying, "Give it time, things will all work out." And yet, a day doesn't go by when, through the government's chronic ineptitude, they are proven wrong.

Besides, wasn't this "system" supposed to have been built and ready to go a couple of months ago?

Sources:

http://www.weeklystandard.com

http://abclocal.go.com

http://www.naturalnews.com