The California Senate has passed a measure to create a state-run, single-payer health system. The proposal would create the California Health System, which would be funded by pooling all federal and state money California currently spends on healthcare and a yet-to-be-determined payroll tax. All state residents would be provided healthcare and people could buy private healthcare to cover services not offered through the state plan, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Over the past year, doctors who run Mayo Clinic pressed for changes that would see Medicare reward the most efficient hospitals and pay less to the least efficient in an effort to cut waste, raise quality, and save money. Now, if a health bill passes it's likely to include a payment formula that would reward efficient, high-quality providers like Mayo. But with some $250 billion in annual Medicare hospital spending at stake, the new payment formula has created a huge fight between potential winners and losers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
Two years after the federal government started its latest push to crack down on Medicare fraud, the number of people charged with fraud against healthcare insurers has barely changed, Justice Department records show. The White House and lawmakers are hoping to use savings from anti-fraud measures in the government-run health plan to help pay for healthcare legislation. Fraud costs Medicare an estimated $60 billion a year, Attorney General Eric Holder told USA Today.
A state-run health insurance program may have an easier time contracting with hospitals after Connecticut's largest insurer agreed to waive a clause in its own contracts, the Hartford Courant reports. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut has a "most favored nation" clause in its contracts with medical providers that requires hospitals to offer Anthem the same or better discounts offered to other insurers. Anthem has waived the clause, said Anthem spokeswoman Sarah Yeager. Anthem's arrangement had made it difficult for the state-subsidized Charter Oak health plan program to secure contracts with hospitals, the Courant reports.
The chairman of the drug industry's main trade group in the U.S. said the group "hasn't withdrawn support" for the version of healthcare reform passed by the Senate, but that the Massachusetts election has "thrown everything up in the air a bit." David Brennan, chief executive of drug company AstraZeneca PLC and the current chairman of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said "it's difficult to say right now" whether the industry's pledge to forgo $80 billion in revenue over a decade to help reduce healthcare costs will remain in place, the Wall Street Journal reports.
A federal arbitration panel ruled that Louisiana would receive $474.8 million to pay for the replacement of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which has been closed since Hurricane Katrina. The ruling gives a major boost to plans to replace Charity, a state-owned hospital for the indigent, with a new $1.2 billion academic medical center, the New York Times reports. State officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been locked in a dispute for more than four years about whether Charity was so damaged that it had to be replaced, and how much the federal government would owe.