Disaster in waiting

Monday, May 12, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Two top Bush administration officials told a House panel that the nation’s hospitals would be overwhelmed by a mass-casualty disaster. Despite this acknowledgement, they oppose efforts in Congress to postpone by a year a White House plan to cut Medicaid payments to teaching and urban public hospitals — facilities with emergency rooms that typically are among the first to receive victims of such incidents as natural disasters or a terrorist attack.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week that Congress would address the nation’s disaster-response needs better by forgoing opposition to Bush’s Medicaid cuts and instead working to fund stockpiles of hospital beds, ventilators and medicines.

Evidently, Leavitt and Chertoff saw no problem with slashing federal funding from emergency rooms — even as they stood before the House panel to respond to a survey that says hospitals in seven major U.S. cities would be unable to respond adequately to a terrorist attack akin to a 2004 attack in Madrid. The incident killed 191 people and wounded 270.

Rep. Harry Waxman, D-Calif., said it was “irresponsible” of Chertoff and Leavitt to fail to analyze how the White House’s proposed cuts would affect hospitals’ response to such a disaster. Waxman also said that stripping “billions of federal dollars” from facilities that “provide the most comprehensive emergency care to the most seriously injured” doesn’t make sense.

Leavitt disagreed, saying that disaster response is about increasing a hospital’s capacity beyond emergency room care and that the Medicaid cuts are not related.

But the cuts cannot help but be related. Among the payments Bush proposes to cut are those for physicians who work in the teaching and public urban hospitals, where emergency rooms already are overwhelmed. Further cuts can only make the situation worse. It would seem that the nation’s top security and health services officials should be able to see that, even when their boss is unwilling to concede this reality.