In order to ensure that HMO patients received timely appointments with doctors, a 2002 law instructed California regulators "to develop and adopt regulations to ensure that enrollees have access to needed healthcare services in a timely manner." The law required the new rules be enacted by January 2004, but The Department of Managed Health Care did not release its proposed rules until 2007. When HMOs and doctors groups objected to them, the department scrapped the rules in favor of ones that let health plans come up with their own methods of complying with the law. The plans have to submit their guidelines in October 2008.
Advocate Health Care said that its merger talks have advanced with Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, IL. Both parties have signed a "letter of intent" to move forward with the consolidation. If the deal is finalized, Condell would become the ninth hospital under the Advocate system.
The Bush administration would cut roughly $560 billion from Medicare over the next decade in order to slow the program's projected annual growth rate from 7 percent to 5 percent, said Bush in a letter to Congress outlining his last budget plan. The budget would leave intact program subsidies to insurers worth an estimated $150 billion over the same period. Some experts are calling the budget, and their associated cuts, "disastrous" for the healthcare industry.
President Bush sent the nation's first-ever $3 trillion budget proposal to Congress, contending that the spending blueprint will fulfill his chief responsibility to keep America safe. The $3.1 trillion proposed budget projects sizable increases in national security but forces the rest of government to pinch pennies. It seeks $196 billion in savings over five years in the government's giant healthcare programs--Medicare and Medicaid. But even with those restraints, the budget projects the deficits will soar to near-record levels of $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009, driven higher in part by efforts to revive the sagging economy with a $145 billion stimulus package.
The board of trustees has approved a $108 million building project that would add at least 60 private patient rooms, a new emergency department and 225,000 square feet of space to Columbus Regional Hospital. Two phases of the project to build the five-story pavilion will begin this year, and completion is expected in 2011. Patient rooms will occupy the second and third floors of the pavilion. The fourth and fifth floors will be unfinished but could accommodate an additional 60 private rooms.
Commercial construction continues to defy the real estate slowdown in the Orlando area. This week The Shermen Group LLC, a full-service real estate company with offices in New York, Boston and Celebration, breaks ground on a $17 million project called Celebration Blvd. Medical Center. The 90,000-square-foot, four-story medical-office center, located on Celebration Boulevard, has frontage along Interstate 4 and will house doctors, other medical professionals and healthcare providers serving residents of Celebration, Osceola County and surrounding areas.