Federal budget hawks badmouth them as 'money laundering,' but directed-payment programs have been a lifeline for hospitals in other states and Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis.
Healthcare mergers generally lead to higher costs without improving quality. Given that private investors aim to maximize profit, this phenomenon can be exacerbated when private equity or hedge funds are involved in such mergers. Thus, it's vital we know when private equity groups or hedge funds are involved in healthcare transactions.
Private equity firms have been buying up hospitals around the country, and new research shows those changes may be affecting the kind of care patients get, especially those with heart failure. In hospitals taken over by private equity, doctors are seeing patients who are less sick on paper but are performing more procedures and moving some patients to other hospitals more often. In particular, the number of Black patients being transferred elsewhere after admission has gone up in these hospitals, raising flags about how decisions are being made and who is being treated where.
Hospital system CHI St. Vincent filed five lawsuits against Blue Cross and Blue Shield's operations in multiple states last week, seeking reimbursement for services rendered in Arkansas, according to filings in Pulaski County Circuit Court. The legal actions add to two other lawsuits the hospital system currently has pending against the insurance giant.
California's two U.S. senators demanded on Wednesday that the Trump administration stop using personal data of millions of Medicaid enrollees — including their immigration status — as part of its sweeping deportation campaign. In a letter to top administration officials, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla expressed alarm over an Associated Press report last week that detailed how deportation officials had obtained the sensitive data over the objections of career health officials. They wrote that health officials needed to stop sharing the information and that DHS should 'destroy any and all such data' it had obtained.
The go-broke dates for Medicare and Social Security's trust funds have moved up as rising healthcare costs and new legislation affecting Social Security benefits have contributed to earlier projected depletion dates, according to an annual report released Wednesday. The go-broke date — or the date at which the programs will no longer have enough funds to pay full benefits — was pushed up to 2033 for Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund, according to the new report from the programs' trustees. Last year's report put the go-broke date at 2036.