Schools, hospitals and nursing homes would get a reprieve from cuts in their Medicaid payments under a House bill to pay for the war in Iraq. In the past two years, the Bush administration has proposed seven Medicaid regulations that it projected would save $13 billion over five years. States and healthcare providers said the proposals would have shifted costs to the states and created new hardships for the poor. One rule would have prohibited Medicaid funding to provide medical education at teaching hospitals. Of the seven changes proposed by the Bush adminstration, only one stays in effect: One that limits which services Medicaid will pay for in hospital outpatient settings.
Employees whose benefits claims are denied are entitled to a fuller day in court than they tend to get now, the United States Supreme Court has decided. Until now, employees who felt wrongly deprived of benefits could expect little help in court unless they could show that their plan administrators had behaved in an arbitrary, capricious or unprincipled way. The Court has eased that requirement, but stopped well short of setting out specific new rules for when and how employees could challenge adverse benefits decisions.
Healthcare providers are allowed to collect millions of dollars in federal Medicare payments each year despite owing the government more than $2 billion in back taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. The office found that more than 27,000 providers flouted the tax system while collecting Medicare fees in 2006. That represented 6% of all providers in the Medicare program.
The patient experience is profiled in in a new book about deadly hospital errors, "Fatal Care: Survive in the U.S. Health System." The book's author says he wrote it to alert the public to the fact that 98,000 patient deaths occur as a result of medical errors in U.S. hospitals annually, and about half of them are preventable. There is little public information available to help patients research a hospital's safety records before seeking care there, he adds.
Although the Pennsylvania Legislature will be on a summer recess, Pittsburgh-area advocates who are pushing for a major healthcare expansion vow to continue their work. The Consumer Health Coalition, Health Care for Health Care Workers and other groups recently traveled to Harrisburg to lobby for Gov. Ed Rendell's Pennsylvania Access to Basic Care plan. The plan would subsidize health insurance for adults with incomes up to 200% of the federal poverty level.
The only hospital in Franklin County, NC, will face an investigation after a state senator complained that hospital nurses are overworked because of staff shortages, resulting in lapses in patient care. Sen. Doug Berger complaints included nurses working eight- and 16-hour shifts with no breaks, breaks not occurring because of inadequate staffing, and staff not receiving lunch breaks. The hospital is already under federal scrutiny after investigators found poor record-keeping by the medical staff as well as problems with how quickly the hospital's labs reported important test results.