As leaders in Congress and the Obama administration look to expand health-insurance coverage while controlling costs, they are considering changing the way doctors are paid for treating Medicare patients. Critics of the current system say it creates a financial incentive for unnecessary treatments. Policy makers and some private insurers may opt to make a single, blanket payment for such things as providing a few months of cancer treatment, which currently can involve many separate billable procedures.
Inova Health has mounted six legal challenges to the Virginia health commissioner's decision authorizing a 164-bed for-profit hospital in Broadlands, and it has twice sought the intervention of the state Supreme Court. Fearing that a nearby competitor would eat into its caseload, Inova has taken out newspaper ads, saturated the neighborhood with direct mail and gave at least $20,000 to a grass-roots movement that has spoken out against HCA Virginia's plan at public meetings. Loudon County's Board of Supervisors will decide on February 3 whether to allow the HCA Virginia network to build a 24-hour acute care hospital in Broadlands.
Two winners emerged from the battle for 41 hospital beds and four operating rooms in Wake County, NC: State regulators approved WakeMed's application to use the beds for a new women's hospital in North Raleigh, while four operating rooms went to the Orthopaedic Surgery Center of Raleigh, a partnership that includes Rex Healthcare. The biggest loser among the applicants was Novant Health, as the Winston-Salem hospital chain proposed using the beds and the operating rooms to build a community hospital in Holly Springs.
Seattle Children's hospital should be allowed to more than double the number of beds and building sizes on its Laurelhurst campus between now and 2030, according to city planners. The determination comes in a recommendation to the Seattle Hearing Examiner's Office, which plans a hearing on the project March 2. The proposed expansion would take in the hospital's 22-acre campus and the 1.8 acres facing it.
The ousted leaders of a California healthcare workers union say they will found a labor organization to rival their former parent union, the Service Employees International Union. The announcement came the day after SEIU President Andy Stern in Washington, DC, wrested control of Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers-West by removing its 100 officers and placing the local under a trustee's care. Sal Rosselli, former president of the 150,000-member local, said it is too early to say who will lead the new national union and how long it would take to get it up and running.
In a letter to the Boston Globe, Joseph Biederman, MD, a Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist, says that a drug company gave congressional investigators inaccurate information about a payment in 2001. U.S. Senator Charles E. Grassley's office had said that Johnson & Johnson gave Biederman $58,169 in 2001, but the psychiatrist said that he earned just $3,500 from the company that year. Most of the amount of the check, $50,000, was deposited into a hospital account to support a scientific conference, "which was mistakenly assigned to my Social Security number," wrote Biederman.