After a weeklong stand-off, Minneapolis-St. Pual nurses nurses and their hospitals appear headed back to the negotiating table. Six hospital groups—representing 14 hospitals—e-mailed letters to the union representing 12,000 nurses asking to restart talks and to include a federal mediator. The nurses had overwhelmingly voted on May 19 to authorize a one-day strike. Since then, each side has accused the other of not doing enough to avert what could be the biggest strike in U.S. nursing history, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
The 10 doctors of Comprehensive Cardiology Consultants have joined St. Elizabeth Healthcare, becoming the only cardiologists directly employed by the Northern Kentucky hospital system. John Dubis, St. Elizabeth's chief operating officer. would not disclose terms of the deal, which brings St. Elizabeth's physician total to 150, mostly primary-care providers. St. Elizabeth will continue to work with Northern Kentucky’s independent cardiology groups, including Cardiology Associates and Northern Kentucky Heart, the Business Courier of Cincinnati reports.
The secretary of health and human services says the government has an obligation to spread the word about the new healthcare law. To that end, the department spent millions of dollars printing a glossy brochure and mailing it this week to 40 million Medicare beneficiaries detailing what Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called "the facts." But Republicans say the brochure is a "gross misuse of taxpayer funds to provide biased information for political purposes," the Washington Post reports.
The board of trustees of Washington, DC-based Sibley Memorial Hospital voted to enter negotiations with Johns Hopkins Medicine to integrate the two healthcare providers, a Sibley hospital spokeswoman said. Exactly how that integration will work will be negotiated over the next two to three months, Sibley spokeswoman Sheiliah Roy said. She said Sibley is not being sold, and that the non-profit 328-bed hospital will stay open. For patients, she said, that is likely to mean they will have easier access to Hopkins personnel.
Small businesses in California are being hit this year with double-digit hikes in health insurance costs that could hurt the state's economic recovery as companies curtail plans for hiring and expansion to pay their insurance bills. Five major insurers in California's small-business market are raising rates 12% to 23% for firms with fewer than 50 employees, according to a survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times. Similar increases are being felt by many small businesses across the nation, mainly the result of escalating costs for medical care and pharmaceuticals, insurers say.
New York City's public hospital system said that some of the thousands of heart test results that were never sent to doctors at Harlem Hospital Center since 2007 had shown signs of abnormal heart function. Hospital officials made the admission a day after acknowledging that results of 4,000 of the echocardiograms tests had never been seen by doctors because of a practice of allowing technicians to read them first, the New York Times reports.