Behaviora health services provider Oceans Healthcare has acquired all outstanding shares of Haven Behavioral Healthcare, Inc., a Nashville-based provider of specialty behavioral health services. The transaction expands Oceans' network into five new states with the addition of seven behavioral health hospitals and outpatient services with locations in Arizona, Idaho, Ohio, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.
Sources say Sharon Regional Medical Center's Emergency Room closed at 7 a.m. on Sunday, and for a few hours, there were no emergency services available at the hospitals serving the Sharon area. The closure comes one day ahead of the original Jan. 6 closure deadline. Posted on the doors of the hospital is a note stating it is closed and that the nearest hospital is UMPC Horizon Shenengo Campus. Frank Jannetti, director of Public Safety for Mercer County, said Sharon Regional is now on diversion, meaning it is no longer accepting patients into its emergency room. Sources say there are no longer any patients at Sharon Regional. The final psychiatric patients were removed last week. The hospital also did no "elective" surgeries last week.
Researchers have identified a focal point for the forces they suspect of driving up cancer cases in young people: the gut. They are searching people’s bodies and childhood histories for culprits. Rates of gastrointestinal cancers among people under 50 are increasing across the globe. In the U.S., colorectal cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in men under 50 and second for women behind breast cancer. Each generation born since the 1950s has had higher risk than the one before. "Everything you can think of that has been introduced in our society since really the 1960s, the post-World War II era, is a potential culprit," said Dr. Marios Giannakis, a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Healthcare companies are ending 2024 in the hot seat. Yet some of the pressures they're facing have been mounting all year — or longer. This month's killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson thrust his company, and his industry, into the spotlight. It also sparked widespread consumer reckoning over denied claims and the high costs of care in the United States, where health care is the most expensive in the world. Now lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle are stepping up their scrutiny of the industry. But even before Thompson's shocking death on a New York City street, and its ongoing aftermath, the business of Big Health Care was having a rocky year. Costs are up, profits are down, top executives have lost their jobs, and investors are selling off the shares. This industry, which affects the lives and very well-being of the entire country, has been getting relentlessly bigger for years. Industry executives say that this growth allows big companies to offer a wider array of low-cost healthcare services to more people, while critics and consumer advocates say that the size and scale of these companies makes them opaque and expensive, and ultimately leads to worse outcomes for patients.
Americans spend more time living with diseases than people from other countries, according to a new study. The AMA's latest findings show that Americans live with diseases for an average of 12.4 years. Mental and substance-use disorders, as well as musculoskeletal diseases, are main contributors to the years lived with disability in the U.S., per the study. Women in the U.S. exhibited a 2.6-year higher so-called healthspan-lifespan gap (representing the number of years spent sick) than men, increasing from 12.2 to 13.7 years or 32% beyond the global mean for women. The latest overall healthspan-lifespan gap in the U.S. marks an increase from 10.9 years in 2000 to 12.4 years in 2024, resulting in a 29% higher gap than the global mean.
Healthcare did not play a big role in the election that's sending President Trump back to the White House and giving Republicans control of Congress. That doesn't mean Congress will avoid the topic next year.