Premera Blue Cross, a health insurer based in the Pacific Northwest, said Tuesday that it was the victim of a cyberattack that could affect 11 million people. The company said hackers gained access to its systems on May 5 and that it did not discover the breach until Jan. 29. The breach could have exposed members' names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, mailing and email addresses, phone numbers, member ID numbers and bank account information, the Mountlake Terrace, Washington, company said. The information dates as far back as 2002 and affects users of Premera Blue Cross, Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alaska, and Vivacity and Connection Insurance Solutions.
In downtrodden East Cleveland, a three-story family health center has replaced the city's full-service hospital. Seven thousand miles away in Abu Dhabi, a gleaming 24-story hospital is preparing to admit patients this year. Back in Ohio, shoppers at Marc's, a local discount grocer and pharmacy in Garfield Heights, can enter a kiosk equipped with a stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff and a two-way video screen that lets a patient talk directly to a doctor. These disparate ventures bear the imprimatur of the renowned Cleveland Clinic, one of the most respected nonprofit health systems in the nation, as it tries to manage the extraordinary changes now transforming health care.
A Duke University study backs up what North Carolina nursing advocates have said for years: Loosened regulations on what nurses may practice. Estimates from the study, funded by the N.C. Nurses Association and done by Christopher J. Conover, a research scholar at Duke University's Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research, show North Carolina could reduce health care spending by $430 million per year and add 3,800 jobs to the economy by the end of the decade simply by expanding the practice abilities of Advance Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs). Currently, most APRNs in North Carolina are forced to sign agreements with supervising physicians in order to practice.
For five decades Community health centers have been hailed by government agencies and medical groups as a solution to care for underserved communities, but in October 2015 a major source of federal funding is set to expire, which could trigger layoffs and cause millions to lose access to health care. The Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care law, originally provided the programs with $11 billion in funding. That program, however, has faced cuts. It also doesn't extend for much longer. The facilities save $24 billion in costs by reducing hospitalizations and emergency room visits, Dan Hawkins, senior vice president for public policy and research at the National Association of Community Health Centers, said in a statement.
In 1836, several French nuns established hospitals and schools here and in California. Today, an effort is afoot to keep the mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange alive. At the Aquinas Institute of Theology, a small Roman Catholic graduate school next to St. Louis University, doctors, administrators and health care leaders take courses on Bible interpretation; Jesus, church and the healing ministry; and the foundations of morality. As the number of nuns and priests who established Catholic hospitals slowly dwindles, lay leaders across the country are increasingly taking their place.
Safety-net hospitals serve a higher percentage of the uninsured, and low-income patients who have Medi-Cal. Jan Emerson-Shea with the California Hospital Association says these hospitals often don't have enough patients with higher-paying commercial insurance to offset losses. "While Medi-Cal does provide some level of reimbursement to hospitals, we still lose significant amounts of money on every Medi-Cal patient we treat," she says. Emerson-Shea says recent changes are adding to the burden. Payments to hospitals are being cut under the Affordable Care Act and through federal sequestration. At the same time, Medi-Cal reimbursements are going down. And the providers are responsible for expensive seismic retrofits and electronic health record systems.