The Station fire inflicted phenomenal costs throughout the medical system.
Gina Gauvin's inpatient care at UMass Memorial Medical Center, in Worcester, totaled $450,000. The total cost for all four UMass patients was $1.1 million. But the hospital was reimbursed only $800,000, a hospital spokesman said.
Rhode Island Hospital, which treated the largest number, billed $4.8 million for the inpatient care of 43 patients, the last of whom left the hospital on May 8. (Unlike the figure from UMass, this number reflects, not costs, but "charges" -- the amount the hospital bills for, but almost never gets. The actual amount collected will be considerably less. The hospital did not have an estimate of costs.)
Yet to be tallied is the cost of any follow-up surgeries and the continuing outpatient care at the hospital's burn clinic. Of Rhode Island Hospital's patients, 15 were on Medicaid, 2 were uninsured and 26 had private insurance.
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island had 51 members who were injured in the fire, and 26 of them were hospitalized. The insurer has spent $1.9 million on them so far, and expects reimbursements for their care to reach anywhere between $4.6 million and $9 million, according to spokesman Scott Fraser.
But many of the fire victims did not have health insurance. Although only 8 percent of Rhode Islanders are without insurance, the crowd attracted to a heavy-metal concert late on a Thursday night included a high proportion of the people least likely to be covered: workers in the service industry, part-timers, unemployed people and young, single men.
Gauvin and 13 other severely injured Rhode Islanders qualified for SSI (Supplemental Security Income, the federal program that provides cash to low-income, disabled people). That automatically made them eligible for state Medicaid health coverage.
Six of the Rhode Islanders injured in the fire were already on Medicaid; 10 more became eligible afterward.
As of Sept. 10, the Rhode Island Medicaid program had spent $658,494 on medical care for victims of The Station fire, according to the Department of Human Services.
But Rhode Island Medicaid pays at rates that often fall well below the cost of care, so the hospitals and nursing agencies will lose money on many of the Medicaid patients -- as they probably will on patients without insurance.
The cost of the fire is thus being borne by health insurers, taxpayers and the institutions that cared for the injured.
