Tower Health, which has six hospitals in the Philadelphia area, is looking for a bigger nonprofit to lift it out of its financial misery, but the biggest health systems in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh say they’re not interested. Executives at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and UPMC told investors last week they are not in the market for an acquisition of a money-losing organization like Tower.
Alignment Healthcare, a provider of privatized Medicare benefits for seniors, has launched its initial public offering. Alignment, which operates in California, North Carolina and Nevada with 81,500 health plan enrollees in more than 20 markets in these states, is the latest health insurer to launch an IPO this year. Oscar Health, which sells individual coverage under the Affordable Care Act and has been expanding its own Medicare Advantage business, went public earlier this year.
An insurance carrier has refused to pay RWJBarnabas Health up to $2.5 billion in claims, even though nine staff members have died and more than 1,000 have been infected with COVID-19, according to a lawsuit. The hospital system claims it lost huge amounts of revenue during the pandemic when surgeries were canceled and its properties were “damaged, lost, uninhabitable, unusable and unfit” due to the rapidly spreading virus.
Americans can write-off the purchase of face masks, hand sanitizer, sanitizing wipes and other personal protective equipment as medical expenses on their taxes if they were bought for the primary purpose of preventing the spread coronavirus, the Internal Revenue Service announced Friday.
Rite Aid shares slumped after the drugstore chain estimated that for fiscal 2021 it would post a net loss and lower adjusted Ebitda. At last check Rite Aid shares were off 18% at $19.12. They closed the regular trading session on Wednesday down 2.4% at $23.34. On Jan. 28 they had set a 52-week high of $32.48. For the fiscal year ended Feb. 27, Rite Aid now expects adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to range $425 million to $435 million.
In the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden proudly ran as an “Obama-Biden Democrat.” But there is already one important difference between Biden and his old boss: Obama used to at least pretend to be concerned about our long-term debt, while Biden isn’t even going through the motions.