Medicaid insurers and their members in two of Oregon’s biggest markets – the Portland area and Lane County - are being dunked into a new world of competition and choice. Over the next several months, the state-approved insurers for those two regions -- Health Share of Oregon and Trillium Community Health Plan in Portland, and Trillium and PacificSource in Lane County -- will compete with each other to enlist Medicaid members.
The interim CEO of the financially strapped Springfield Hospital says its financial structure is unsustainable and its survival will be “virtually impossible” unless it merges with other hospitals in its region. Michael Halstead, the interim CEO of Springfield Hospital, which filed for bankruptcy in June as it tries to restructure about $20 million in debt, presented its proposed budget Wednesday to the Green Mountain Care Board.
On March 8, 2011, Joclyn Krevat, an occupational therapist in New York, was sitting at her computer when she received a most unusual LinkedIn request. The wording was the familiar: “I’d like to add you to my professional network.” The sender was familiar, too, but not for the reason Krevat expected. It was from a debt collector.
I believe that health care providers aren’t paid anything close to what they are worth to society. I don’t mean this in the sappy emotional sense in which the “value of any human’s life is infinite,” or any other subjective standard. I am talking about real world, measurable economic impacts. Using the entrepreneurs’ 10% reward as a guide, health care providers create astronomical value for which they are paid a small token.
Family physician Timothy Wong’s new iHealth Clinic in the heart of East Liberty won’t accept your health insurance and it doesn’t deal with co-payments or deductibles. He will, however, treat your cold, manage your blood pressure or remove a callus for $35 per medical problem.
When former New Jersey Congressman Rob Andrews was picked to head the Healthcare Transformation Alliance in 2015, 15 companies were on board to support the organization’s effort to reduce employer-sponsored health care costs.