Several members of DeKalb County's Board of Commissioners said that they need time to digest the details of the proposal to transfer day-to-day administration of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta to a nonprofit corporation. The authority that runs the public hospital approved the new arrangement last month, but both DeKalb and Fulton counties also must approve the change because of their debt arrangements with the hospital system.
Iowa Legislators have announced a healthcare package that would extend coverage to all children in the state. The state would extend existing programs to an additional 25,000 youngsters who are eligible for healthcare but excluded because the state can't afford to pay for their coverage. An additional 19,000 children without coverage would get a state subsidy to enroll them in private plans. Supporters of the plan said they hoped to have all children covered within about three years.
The top two legislative leaders in Massachusetts are considering raising the cigarette tax as one of several funding and cost-cutting strategies for the state's healthcare initiative. The lawmakers said they would also consider stiffer penalties on businesses that fail to insure their workers as a means to raise additional funds. And they are seeking ways to reduce healthcare costs, despite promising not to scale back the health insurance initiative.
In order to ensure that HMO patients received timely appointments with doctors, a 2002 law instructed California regulators "to develop and adopt regulations to ensure that enrollees have access to needed healthcare services in a timely manner." The law required the new rules be enacted by January 2004, but The Department of Managed Health Care did not release its proposed rules until 2007. When HMOs and doctors groups objected to them, the department scrapped the rules in favor of ones that let health plans come up with their own methods of complying with the law. The plans have to submit their guidelines in October 2008.
Advocate Health Care said that its merger talks have advanced with Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, IL. Both parties have signed a "letter of intent" to move forward with the consolidation. If the deal is finalized, Condell would become the ninth hospital under the Advocate system.
The Bush administration would cut roughly $560 billion from Medicare over the next decade in order to slow the program's projected annual growth rate from 7 percent to 5 percent, said Bush in a letter to Congress outlining his last budget plan. The budget would leave intact program subsidies to insurers worth an estimated $150 billion over the same period. Some experts are calling the budget, and their associated cuts, "disastrous" for the healthcare industry.