The Shriners Hospital for Children has signed a deal to buy nearly 6 acres of property from Washington University to build a hospital that will collaborate more closely with St. Louis Children's Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine physicians. Terms of the property deal were not disclosed. The Shriners expect to sell its first area 60-bed hospital in Frontenac, MO, that specializes in pediatric orthopedic services when the new one is completed. It is unknown how many beds or operating rooms the new hospital will hold, and preliminary estimates put the cost at about $86 million.
An Oakland-based youth advocacy group, Children Now, gave low marks to the state of children's health and education in California and urged leaders to boost funding and take action. The 2008 California Report Card, created by the group assigned letter grades to certain health and educational factors affecting California's children, assigning health insurance a C, and obesity a D. The report also found that fewer than half of the state's families can afford the basics of housing, child care, food, health insurance and transportation.
San Francisco's expansion of its landmark plan to provide healthcare to its 73,000 uninsured city residents saw few people taking advantage of the opporunity. At the program's new eligibility office near San Francisco General Hospital just one person had phoned by noon on the day of the expansion and all the chairs in the waiting room were empty.
Beginning late next year, Maryland will become the first state to give consumers independent evaluations of Preferred Provider Organization health plans offered by four of the state's largest healthcare providers. Consumers will be able to get information about the quality of care offered by a PPO health-plan provider, the number of complaints received and how customers are treated.
The historic new trust intended to pay the health costs of United Auto Workers retirees from Detroit's automakers could run out of money much sooner than anticipated. Thanks to two key problems: possibly inaccurate assumptions about the growth of healthcare costs, and $36 billion of the plan is unfunded so far. Industry experts say the scant public information about the trust--known as a voluntary employees' beneficiary association, or VEBA--provides little comfort that current benefits will remain as promised for hundreds of thousands of UAW retirees.
Nearly five dozen hospitals filed suit this week seeking to overturn a state rule that allows general surgeons to open physician-owned surgery centers without going through the state's healthcare planning process. Under the new rule, general surgeons who focus on abdominal surgeries are classified as a "single specialty." Single-specialty surgery centers that are located in a doctor's office are exempt from the state's certificate of need laws. The hospitals argue that the ruling never intended general surgeons to classify for the exemption.