Local hospitals are slamming a national report that they've been penalized for a lack of patient safety. According to the report, Medicare reimbursements at more than 700 hospitals across the country will be reduced by one percent during the fiscal year that began in October of 2014. Eleven Kansas hospitals are on the list. Of the ones that spoke with KAKEnews Thursday, they say this is the first time they've heard about the report. Staff at South Central Kansas Medical Center in Arkansas City spent the afternoon fielding calls from community leaders who were inquiring about the news story that Medicare is punishing them for their high rate of hospital-acquired infections and injuries.
Improvements to the delivery of health care are being driven by a new group of critics, some with no medical training and very limited experience. They might not have the expertise, but their opinions carry more weight than ever in the U.S. health care industry. Patient perspectives are being assessed, implemented and evaluated like never before and not just because hospitals are trying to gain a competitive advantage or improve their bottom lines. Effort is being made to treat patients as people, not diagnoses, and to call them by their names, their nicknames or however else they might want to be called.
It's not the flu that has us feeling under the weather. It's the revelation that area hospitals have not been doing an adequate job of protecting patients from mistakes. Beaufort Memorial Hospital is among 13 S.C. hospitals being penalized by the federal government because of the number of hospital-acquired conditions that affected Medicare patients between 2011 and 2013. The score card is part of the government's toughest effort yet to crack down on infections and make sure that patient safety is a top priority for the nation's medical facilities. Based on the rate of Medicare patient complications, U.S. hospitals received overall scores of 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst.
Roughly 9.6 million people could lose medical coverage on ObamaCare's exchanges if the Supreme Court rules that subsidies distributed by the federal marketplaces are invalid, according to a new study. Researchers with the RAND Corp., a nonpartisan research group, said such a ruling could cause "significant instability" and "threaten the viability of the individual health insurance market" in the 34 states where the federal government manages the exchange. Premiums on the individual market would also rise by 47 percent, or $1,610 annually, for a 40-year-old non-smoker with a silver plan, the study said.
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a 17-year-old girl with cancer must continue to get chemotherapy against her will. The girl, identified in court documents as Cassandra C., had asked the court to allow her to make her own medical decisions, even though she won't turn 18 until September. But CBS Connecticut reports the justices unanimously upheld a lower court ruling ordering her to continue treatment. The Associated Press reports Cassandra currently is confined in a room at Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford, where she is being forced to undergo chemotherapy. Doctors said the treatment would give her an 85 percent chance of survival, but without it she would likely die within two years.
Large employers are increasingly putting an end to their most generous health-care coverage as a tax on "Cadillac" insurance plans looms closer under Obamacare. Employees including bankers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and college professors at Harvard University are seeing a range of moves to shift more costs to workers. Companies are introducing higher deductibles and co-payments, rising premiums and the imposition of wellness programs that carry penalties for people who don't comply. Requiring employees to shoulder more of the cost burden may undermine public support for Obamacare just as Congress, now firmly under Republican control, considers new ways to gut the law.