Health agency's hiatus is over
Considered a leader in studying health-care quality, it was closed in the Pa. budget battle.
HARRISBURG - Gov. Rendell yesterday signed an executive order reopening a highly regarded health-care agency after an unexpected weeklong hiatus.
The order allows the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, which fell victim to the budget season's political battle, to resume operations through November and send its 44 employees, who were let go July 1, back to work.
"Employees are being notified as we speak that they should come back to work," said Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo late yesterday afternoon.
The council, known as HC4, is an independent agency considered a national leader in studying the quality of health care and its cost at the state level.
David Nash, chairman of the department of health policy at Jefferson Medical College and chair of the agency's advisory board, said he was very pleased by the news.
"I had gotten some job-seeking e-mails from a couple of people on the staff," he said. "I thought it would be awfully hard for Pennsylvania to believe it was a leader in health care without HC4."
But the long-term future of the council, which still needs its five-year authorization approved by the legislature, remains unclear.
The council was drawn into an unrelated struggle between Rendell and Senate Republicans over health coverage for the uninsured.
In an effort to extend medical-malpractice subsidies to doctors, Senate Republican leaders tied the council's authorization bill to one extending those medical-malpractice subsidies.
Rendell has said he would not sign the malpractice bill unless Senate Republicans approved his plan to provide health-insurance coverage to 275,000 low- and moderate-income Pennsylvanians.
"The governor believes if the commonwealth can underwrite insurance for doctors, it can underwrite insurance for those who can't get it for themselves," said Ardo.
Evidence suggests the battle between Rendell and the Senate Republicans will resume when the legislature returns to work in mid-September and must again take up the council's funding along with malpractice subsidies and health insurance.
Erik Arneson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dominic F. Pileggi (R., Delaware), said he was pleased the council employees will be able to return to work, but urged House leadership to vote on the Senate-approved bill reauthorizing malpractice funding for doctors and the council.
"The governor's decision to reopen the council by executive order proves that his action to shut it down last week was unnecessary," said Arneson.
Ardo said the administration could not act until it knew the $5 million council appropriation was in the final budget document.
"Until we saw the line item in the budget [approved Friday], it was difficult to know what the Senate Republicans' intent was," he said.
House Speaker Dennis M. O'Brien (R., Phila.) bemoaned the fact that the council got tangled up in a "political tug of war" and said he was relieved the employees and the large amount of sensitive patient information in the council's possession would be safe.
"They do quality work. They deserved to be reestablished," said O'Brien, whose bill requiring insurance companies to provide autism coverage, which is to be signed by Rendell today, got a boost from a council report last month. "I am glad the governor stepped up to the plate."
The 22-year-old council gained national attention in 1992 when it issued a report on heart-bypass surgery that showed how well patients fared by hospital. Four years later, it issued a first-of-its-kind report on heart attacks.
As a result of the council's work, Pennsylvania hospitals were the first in the nation required to report on infections patients contracted while under their care.
Nash said the council was updating its hospital-acquired-infection report and its report on cardiac surgery when it was shut down last week.