Grady Memorial Hospital officials expect to release patient numbers they hope will clarify a lengthy, continuing dispute with Fulton County, GA, on what services the hospital provides and how much taxpayer money Fulton should contribute. How many indigent patients Grady treats, and where they live, have been in question for at least five years as the hospital and the county work under a 25-year-old contract for financial support that each agrees is vague and flawed. Efforts to rework the deal gained new energy when Fulton voted to withhold $26.5 million from the public hospital until it showed greater transparency and accountability.
Enrollment in Wisconsin healthcare programs such as BadgerCare Plus has increased by about 238,000 people, or 35%, in the past six years and is expected to rise as the economy continues to struggle.
Medicaid programs provide some level of healthcare to about 1 in 6 Wisconsin residents.
New research by a UT Southwestern Medical Center physician calls into question whether health insurers are adequately containing costs. Ethan Halm, MD, chief of internal medicine at UT Southwestern, found that private managed-care plans for Medicare do no better job of steering patients away from unnecessary surgeries than the traditional fee-for-service system, where the patient goes to any provider and the doctor or hospital bills Medicare directly.
Although a proposed merger between the two Pennsylvania insurers has been called off, Highmark, Inc. and Independence Blue Cross will look for ways, outside of a merged structure, to capitalize on the knowledge they gained of each others' businesses as they planned for integration.
It will get vastly cheaper for most people to keep health insurance after losing a job if the government's stimulus plan becomes law. But the billions to be poured into healthcare from the economic stimulus package will do little, if anything, about the chronic conditions behind the nation's large ranks of uninsured. Instead the plan is a temporary lifeline, hasty measures for nearly desperate times, according to this article from the Associated Press.
More than a dozen Connecticut lawmakers have warned that thousands of vulnerable residents in the HUSKY health insurance program could struggle to get healthcare because of what they called premature changes to HUSKY that took effect Feb. 1. The changes are the result of the state ending its relationship with Anthem BlueCare, a longtime HUSKY insurance carrier that did not bid on new HUSKY contracts last year. The state is also ending its traditional Medicaid program, and people in both plans must now switch carriers.