The Indiana Health Care Association is looking for a new leader even as it tries to dig out of a pile
of debt. Current President Steve Smith, whose contract expires Nov. 30, says he’s put the organization on a path to be financially stable by 2012. But his predecessor says Smith has ruined a once-strong organization.
Not-for-profit sees increasing numbers of patients, but can't plug the entire gap to be created by health care retirements.
To pay for a shiny new downtown hospital, the parent corporation of Wishard Health Services will commit itself to yearly
debt payments 10 times as high as they are now. But Wishard officials have no doubt they can bear the extra load
because of places like Rosewalk Village, a nursing home that sits on the eastern side of Indianapolis.
The cost of nursing home care in Indianapolis is rising faster than in the rest of the country, according to an annual survey
of long-term-care costs by Virginia-based Genworth Financial.
Now that Medicare is calling for all doctors it deals with to use electronic medical records by 2015, the trend of physicians’
merging with hospitals or larger groups could hasten.
It can be tempting to trust in "experts," when it comes to loved ones’ health and nursing home care. But the consequences can be dire.
A Texas developer of retirement communities has targeted Carmel for a style of assisted living new to the Indianapolis area that offers on-site health care for the unusual arrangement of a fi xed monthly fee.
Steve Smith has shaken up the Indiana Health
Care Association so much, the group representing Indiana’s for-profit nursing homes is hardly recognizable to those who knew
it before. And the way Smith tells it, he’s just getting started.
