Weak U.S. economy not hurting Tenet business

By Bill Berkrot

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chief executive of hospital chain operator Tenet Healthcare Corp (THC.N) said on Tuesday his company is in a growth phase and has not been hurt by the weakness in the U.S. economy that has hit so many companies across a wide variety of business sectors.

"We have looked hard for indications that there are effects coming out of the overall weakness in the economy that are hurting our business, and it's actually hard to find them," Trevor Fetter told Reuters in an interview.

"Our earnings have steadily grown; our margin has expanded; we've now had two quarters in a row of positive admissions growth. Those are the metrics that are most important for assessing that we're in a growth path," Fetter said.

"The kind of classic things you would expect to see if you were having a recession right now, we're not seeing," he said.

"We haven't seen a deterioration of credit quality of individual patients who owe us money," Fetter said.

"We have seen an increase in the number of uninsured patients who are employed," he added.

Tenet earlier Tuesday reported earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations.

Although Tenet reported a net loss for the quarter, excluding legal costs and other special items, the company earned 4 cents a share -- 4 cents better than analysts'' average forecasts for a break-even quarter.

"Since about the third quarter of 2007 we've really been doing very well," Fetter said.

Hospital companies have struggled to grow admissions and reduce debt as they are forced to treat uninsured patients unable to pay their medical bills -- and Tenet is hardly immune to those forces.

Fetter acknowledged that there have been some troubling trends affecting the hospital business that are not necessarily connected to the current state of the economy.

He cited the impact of employers shifting much more of the burden of health care costs onto employees via soaring co-pays and deductibles in health care plans.

"There are these longer-term trends toward the financial responsibility of patients and the suppression of medical care that are more disturbing to us, but it's nothing new," he said.

"It has affected the appetite of people to consume healthcare and their ability to pay."

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot; editing by John Wallace and Gerald E. McCormick)