Airlifts from Haiti resume as U.S. government says it will pay to treat quake victims

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The airlift of critically injured patients from Haiti
resumed full speed Monday as the U.S. government agreed to pick up
their medical costs, resolving a sticky problem for U.S. hospitals.

U.S. military medical evacuation flights from the
devastated nation had halted for five days because of uncertainty over
the arrangements.

The first flight of the renewed airlift was due to deliver two dozen victims to Palm Beach International Airport on Monday night.

“It’s fantastic news,” said Dr. William O’Neill, dean of clinical affairs at the University of Miami medical school. O’Neill is helping coordinate medical rescue efforts.

“There was a very large concern that South Florida
hospitals were going to get inundated with patients for whom they would
not get compensated,” O’Neill said. “They now have a format so they
know they can take these patients without it breaking them.”

O’Neill said at least three people who died in Haiti might have survived if they could have been flown to Florida.

Officials estimated South Florida
hospitals, which have taken in 461 of 538 injured people flown to the
state, have spent several million dollars treating uninsured earthquake
victims.

The military halted medical evacuation flights Wednesday after Gov. Charlie Crist sent a letter to federal disaster planners saying local hospitals were
near saturation and asking that federal disaster funds begin to flow.
Without the military, private rescue flights could carry only a few
critically injured people at a time.

Crist and South Florida hospital officials have since said they never meant to imply they could not or would not take more earthquake victims.

The White House said Sunday the flights would resume.

On Monday, Crist and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met at the Broward County emergency operations center.

Hours later, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would activate the National Disaster Medical System, which pays hospitals to treat earthquake victims.

An estimated 200,000 people died and hundreds of thousands were injured in the Jan. 12 disaster.

“These evacuations are being reserved for the rare patients with life-threatening conditions that cannot be handled within Haiti or by evacuation to another country,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. “There must also be a reasonable chance that the
patient can survive the flight and the treatment in the U.S.”

The biggest numbers of earthquake evacuees — most of them U.S. citizens — have come to tax-assisted public hospitals in South Florida.

Jackson Health System, the financially struggling public program in Miami-Dade County, has incurred $2.2 million in charges so far for treating uninsured victims, who make up about half of the 137 people taken there, said Chief Executive Eneida Roldan.

Tax-assisted Broward Health and Memorial Healthcare systems have treated 84 and 97, respectively, but officials said they had no estimates of the costs.

“It’s not that it’s a burden, but it’s an added
responsibility and an added dollar sign,” Roldan said. “Anything that
would cover our charges would be a great idea.”

Even so, Bruce Rueben, president of the Florida Hospital Association,
said institutions were prepared to take all disaster victims sent, even
if federal funding was not in place. Big-city hospitals in the state
had 3,800 empty beds that could be used.

Military officials said they had resumed sending one or two C-130 transport flights per day from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa to Port-au-Prince, to take victims to the airport near the Florida hospital deemed most appropriate.

Jaime Caldwell, a vice president at the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association, said few would be sent to Broward and Miami-Dade facilities until after the Super Bowl on Sunday, as a precaution in case of a disaster during the game.

University of Miami rescue organizers said airlifts are not a long-term solution. They have asked the government to build one or more hospitals in Haiti to replace those demolished by the quake.

“There will be a secondary wave of people who need to be treated,” O’Neill said.

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