The Washington Post
Monday, JUNE 1, 2009
By JORDAN RAU, Kaiser Health News

Westwood, N.J. — The last thing New Jersey needs is more hospitals, given that there aren’t enough patients to fill all the existing beds, a prestigious state commission declared last year. So why is there now a campaign to build a new one just a few miles from others?

Money and popular demand are behind it. Hackensack University Medical Center sees an opportunity to grow by constructing a for-profit facility in this middle-class suburb of about 11,000 people near New York City. Borough leaders covet a big new employer to bolster sagging tax rolls and boost local businesses. And residents like Lee Tremble take solace in the thought that if they took ill, an ambulance could whisk them to a hospital in just a few minutes.

“I’m 58, my blood pressure is high, my cholesterol is out of whack,” said Tremble, a local restaurant owner. “I know if I have a heart attack, I’m not making it” to a hospital farther away. He and many other Westwood residents are championing the 128-bed proposed hospital against opposition from two regional hospitals that fear a new competitor nearby.

The campaign is a case study of the formidable obstacles confronting President Barack Obama and Congress as they try to mine savings from the $2.5 trillion health care system. Tens of billions of dollars must be found to keep health care spending from gobbling up an increasing share of the economy and thwarting efforts to insure all Americans. But standing in the way are strong financial incentives and public enthusiasm for the latest and often most expensive facilities, technologies and procedures. There’s also powerful resistance to making do with less.

This is especially true in New Jersey, whose residents receive some of the most extensive and costly medical care in the nation. It’s not only that there are too many hospitals scrambling for patients to fill their high-priced beds. Compared to most other states, elderly patients here are more likely to end up in intensive care units and undergo extra testing.

In the last two years of their lives, New Jersey patients on Medicare see specialists an average of 50 times — twice as often as those in Connecticut and more than four times as often as those in Minnesota, according to the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

Read the rest of the article at the Washington Post online or at New Jersey Newsroom.