According to a 10-year retrospective study, high-risk patients with acute myocardial infarction (MI) were also less likely to receive percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), according to Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, and colleagues. The results appear in JAMA Internal Medicine. Using data collected from Medicare claims from 2002 to 2011, Jena's group identified 211,058 hospitalizations to teaching hospitals for acute MI, heart failure, and cardiac arrest that occurred during the American Heart Association (AHA) and American College of Cardiology (ACC) meetings.
It was a frenetic year in the healthcare world as ObamaCare took root and Ebola fears swept the country. While the healthcare law survived a rough first year, the Obama administration was faced with new uncertainty as the Supreme Court decided to consider the validity of the insurance subsides it provides. And in an added headache for ObamaCare defenders, consultant Jonathan Gruber became a household name thanks to viral clips of him insulting voters when discussing passage of the law. Here are the five healthcare stories that mattered this year.
Medicare has begun punishing 721 hospitals with high rates of infections and other medical errors, cutting payments to half of the nation's major teaching hospitals and many institutions that are marquee names. Intermountain Medical Center in Utah, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, NYU Langone Medical Center and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago are all being docked 1 percent of their Medicare payments through next September, federal records show. In total, hospitals will forfeit $373 million, Medicare estimates.
Three private, nonprofit health systems have challenged the "equity in state funding" provided to the Virginia Commonwealth University and University of Virginia health systems to compensate them for treating indigent patients and teaching graduate medical students. In a presentation to state health and budget officials this fall, the Sentara, INOVA and Carilion health systems said they operate private teaching hospitals and Level 1 trauma centers in Norfolk, Fairfax County and Roanoke that receive less than one-eighth of the public compensation given to VCU and U.Va. for indigent care and medical education ? $29.2 million compared with $243.9 million for the public hospitals in the last fiscal year.
Vermont was supposed to be the beacon for a single-payer health care system in America. But now its plans are in ruins, and its onetime champion Gov. Peter Shumlin may have set back the cause. Advocates of a "Medicare for all" approach were largely sidelined during the national Obamacare debate. The health law left a private insurance system in place and didn't even include a weaker "public option" government plan to run alongside more traditional commercial ones. So single-payer advocates looked instead to make a breakthrough in the states.
Thousands of Greater Cincinnati patients of UC Health may be shopping for new doctors in the new year as the region's largest medical system and United Healthcare fight over the terms of a contract to replace a deal that expires Dec. 31. The executive director of United Healthcare in Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky laid out the major problem to reaching an agreement: UC Health, he said, has asked for "a double-digit rate increase and to be paid significantly more than what other similar academic hospitals in Ohio and Kentucky are paid for providing the same services."