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Dayton Business Journal...
Kasich
pledges $2M for research by
Ohio children’s hospitals
by Carrie Ghose
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Gov.
John Kasich pledged $2 million,
possibly from casino revenue, to jump-start collaborative research
among Ohio’s
six pediatric hospitals in an impromptu move Thursday while touring the
Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
“If
I commit $1 million here, can we
work with the other hospitals?” he said while touring a lab where
frozen
samples of cancerous tumors from around the country are processed. “If
I commit
$2 million, that’s even better, right?”
“Twice
as good, sir,” said Dr. John
Barnard, institute president.
“We’ve
got this gambling money coming
in, and I keep giving it away because I’m a bleeding heart,” said the
Republican governor.
Kasich
was referring to revenue the
state will receive from Ohio’s four casinos, which begin to come on
line next
year. Later, he backed off of naming a definite source for the pledge,
saying
he’d “find it somewhere.”
Kasich
said the pledge was unplanned
until he saw the researchers at work, and he wouldn’t put any strings
on the
money other than requiring that the six hospitals work cooperatively.
“We’re
very thrilled the governor
values collaboration,” said Dr. Steve Allen, the hospital’s CEO. “We’re
very
fortunate to be in a state where so much collaboration already goes on.”
The
state’s two-year budget keeps a
Kasich proposal that cuts $33 million in direct payments to the
pediatric
hospitals to cover their disproportionate Medicaid losses, but it
creates a
potential new revenue stream by adopting a statewide care coordination
model
based on a program that started at Nationwide Children’s.
Kasich
was visiting the hospital to talk
about how Partners for Kids, a network of nearly 400 primary-care
doctors
serving some 300,000 children on Medicaid, is the model for the new
plan.
He
made the pledge to Children’s while
touring the tumor registry lab that last year won a renewal of its
stimulus-supported federal contract, which could be worth $49 million
if
renewed through all six years of the project.
Read
it with links at Dayton Business
Journal
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