An aldermanic committee Mattison chairs wrote a report critical of the hospital. Among other changes, Mattison would like to see the hospital automatically give free non-emergency care people with hospital debts and to immigrants without proof of legal residency, the way the Hospital of St. Raphael does; and to treat people they think are eligible for Medicaid while their Medicaid applications are pending.

The hospital responded that, rather than deal with the facts, the aldermen were simply parroting the views of a union trying to organize Yale-New Haven workers. "We remain concerned that the resolution you have developed for consideration by the Board of Aldermen relies almost entirely on a report authored and distributed by the Service Employees International Union," the hospital wrote in a letter to the committee.

"I am not in the employ of the union," Mattison said. The East Rock Democrat noted that he disagreed with union organizers who got involved in September's Democratic Party aldermanic primaries. "But I do believe that this issue of free care is important, and I do believe Yale does not have an adequate system."

"Apples and Oranges"?
Meanwhile, hospital officials huddled Monday with state regulators who released an embarrassing report last Friday, according to spokesman Vin Petrini (pictured). The report showed that Yale-New Haven approves only 40 percent of requests for free care, while hospitals like St. Raphael's are closer to 90 percent.

"It's an apples and oranges comparison," Petrini said Monday. "We took a very conservative interpretation of the reporting requirements." Yale-New Haven counted only some of its charitable programs in its reporting of free care because, in the past, hospitals have been criticized for inflating those figures to try to quialify for greater government reimbursement, Petrini said.

Other hospitals counted sliding-scale fees and subsidized clinic visits in their numbers, he said. If Yale-New Haven had done that, "We'd be in the same ballpark," he claimed. He didn't yet have those numbers.

Underlying the free care controversy is whether or not the issue has anything to do with the new cancer center Yale-New Haven wants to build.

The hospital blames the union trying to organize the hospital's blue-collar workers with injecting irrelevant issues into the discussion.

The union points to a recent Harvard study to show how the issues are indeed linked. Nationally, according to the study, about half the Americans who file for bankruptcy do so because of medical debts. Cancer is by far the most expensive factor.