Marquette chief executive officer W. Trent Crable announced that Wael Khouli, MD, MBA, has been appointed to serve as Chief Medical Officer for UP Health System – Marquette, effective May 17. Dr. Khouli comes to Marquette from HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he served as Medical Director of Care Management for the three-hospital system. UP Health is a Duke Lifepoint hospital.
Ocala Health has announced the appointment of Chad P. Christianson as CEO effective June 1. He will replace Randy McVay, who is retiring to concentrate on family and personal projects. Ocala Health, an affiliate of HCA, includes Ocala Regional Medical Center and West Marion Community Hospital, several outpatient services and practices, and a free-standing emergency room scheduled to open later this year in Summerfield.
The timing could hardly have been worse. Just when an organ became available for the first-ever penis transplant in the United States, almost every last urologist in the country was at a conference in San Diego, Calif. Within 24 hours, Dr. Dicken Ko would be back in Boston performing the operation. He booked the next flight he could find, and called a colleague so that the operating room would be ready.
Making the American health care system significantly cheaper would mean more than just cutting the insurance companies out of the game and reducing the high administrative costs of the American system. It would also require paying doctors and nurses substantially lower salaries, using fewer new and high-tech treatments, and probably eliminating some of the perks of American hospital stays, like private patient rooms.
After "super bug" outbreaks last year involving a hard-to-clean medical scope, state health inspectors descended on two of Los Angeles’ largest hospitals and found numerous safety violations that appeared to put far more patients at risk. At UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, the state declared an “immediate jeopardy” – meaning lives were at imminent risk – on March 4, 2015, after finding staff using contaminated water and a tainted liquid cleaner dispenser being used to ready colonoscopes and other devices for the next patients.
Even as many beneficiaries acknowledge that they might not have insurance today without the law, there remains a strong undercurrent of discontent. Though their insurance cards look the same as everyone else’s — with names like Liberty and Freedom from insurers like Anthem or United Health — the plans are often very different from those provided to most Americans by their employers. Many say they feel as if they have become second-class patients.