Across the state, public hospitals and health systems operate under highly challenging financial circumstances and are faced with the herculean task of developing financial strategies that will contain costs yet allow them to provide comprehensive care to California’s large population of low-income, uninsured and underserved residents.
Hospital system giant Advocate Aurora Health is offering early retirement buyouts to as many as 300 management employees — a move that comes a little more than year after the system’s creation through a merger. The system, which has 27 hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin, is offering a voluntary early retirement program to eligible management employees, said spokesman Adam Mesirow, in an email.
A global rating agency on Monday downgraded its outlook for Care New England following last week’s decision by Partners HealthCare to withdraw a bid to take over the hospital system. S&P Global Ratings downgraded its outlook on CNE debt to stable from positive. The global credit rating company said the downgrade was a direct result of the deal not happening between Massachusetts-based Partners, parent of Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and CNE, the second largest hospital system in Rhode Island.
Rick Pollack, President and CEO, American Hospital Association: Your editorial “A Merger Cure for Bigger Government” (June 5) misses the mark in its criticism of hospitals and health systems as drivers of health-care spending. Hospitals have held price growth to under 2% in recent years.
The human body is a frail thing, and illness is a pitiless adversary. Every day, an untold number of Americans are diagnosed with a devastating illness or suffer a sudden injury that threatens to upend their lives and tear apart their families. This misfortune often comes at a staggeringly high financial cost that can be just as cruel.
The needle hasn't moved much on newly eligible adults opting for Medicare Advantage (MA) plans over traditional Medicare: In 2016, 29% of adults opted into MA plans during their first eligible year, a 6-percentage-point increase from the 23% who selected MA during their first year of eligibility in 2011, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.