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About Us
2004 Community Benefits Annual Report Summary
CHRISTUS Health remains committed to offering the highest quality healthcare services for all but the road ahead does appear to be a challenging one. The US Census Bureau reports that both the number of Americans living in poverty and the number without health insurance rose by more than 1 million in 2003. Both sets of data rose for the third straight year. One in eight people now lives in poverty and one in six is without insurance.
In the most recent CDC data, Texas leads the nation in uninsured; the percent of uninsured Texans increased from 24.1 percent to 24.6 percent. Louisiana ranks third in the nation with 19.4% without health insurance coverage.
These trends are reflected in the nearly 7% increase in Inpatient and Outpatient Charity Care. CHRISTUS Health’s Charity Care directive recommends that Regions waive charges for uninsured patients with incomes up to 100% of federal poverty guidelines and offer sliding scale discounts to those without insurance with incomes between 100 and 400% of poverty.
Total Charity Care, the unpaid cost of medical services provided to the uninsured and underinsured, including Medicaid, decreased by about 8% when compared with fiscal year 2003 due to higher reimbursement rates. The value of our Community Services contribution to the communities rose by approximately 21% to $31,204,627, predominantly due to a decrease in medical education reimbursement. In sum, these two indicators of community benefit by our System decreased from 10.0% of net patient revenue in FY 2003 to 8.9% in FY2004.
Government Sponsored Programs like Medicare contributed another $213,541,299 in unpaid costs for FY 2004 and down nearly 6.7% from the year before. System wide, the total of community benefit plus unpaid Medicare is about 18.3% of NPR for FY 2004.
