The official severing between a nonprofit that had been the fundraising arm of Aspen Valley Hospital for 41 years and the health care facility was finalized earlier this year after the two entities spent two years arguing whether millions of dollars in donations were properly distributed. The Aspen Valley Foundation, which is now defunct as a result of the dispute and was formerly known as the Aspen Valley Medical Foundation from its inception in 1973 to 2012, contends that the hospital attempted to collect $9 million of donations that were intended for other needy nonprofits in the valley, like the Aspen Homeless Shelter and HomeCare & Hospice of the Valley.
The pictures of medical dysfunction were devastating ? broken hospitals in Africa struggling, and largely failing, to contain the Ebola epidemic. As deaths mounted, the problems seemed intractable: no money, no infrastructure, no hope. But across the ocean, Haiti ? a broken country if there ever was one ? now has two new clinics, open-air, modest in size and cost, designed to tackle diseases that can be as insidious and deadly as Ebola, but are also more common: cholera and tuberculosis. The clinics here are simple, even handsome. Instead of constructing hermetic shields in the form of airtight, inflexible hospital buildings, the architects took advantage of Haiti's Caribbean environment, exploiting island cross breezes to heal patients and aid caregivers.
Ebola czar Ron Klain on Sunday defended the Centers for Disease Control's response to the Ebola crisis, even as he criticized this week's mishandling of a virus sample that exposed a technician to the disease. "It's obviously unacceptable to have any mishandling of Ebola materials," Klain said on CBS's "Face the Nation," where he hailed the CDC's efforts to fight Ebola in the United States and called the agency a national treasure. Klain, the U.S. Ebola response coordinator appointed by President Obama earlier this year, said the CDC was reviewing this week's incident and would have a full report ready within weeks. He also said it was important to put things in perspective.
Vast spending, frustrating software, angry doctors facing a punch in the wallet — and a hungry new Congress. It could add up to a powerful threat to the Obama administration's $30 billion program to digitize the nation's medical records. Many doctors hate the clunky, time-sucking software they got through the massive subsidy program, and most complain that cumbersome information exchange is frustrating their efforts to coordinate and improve patient care. A quarter-million — half of those eligible for the electronic health records program — will face fines in 2015 for failing to use the systems in the way the government required.
Andy Pasternak, a family doctor in Reno, Nev., has seen more than 100 new Medicaid patients this year after the state expanded the insurance program under the Affordable Care Act. But he won't be taking any new ones after Dec. 31. That's when the law's two-year pay raise for primary care doctors like him who see Medicaid patients expires, resulting in fee reductions of 43 percent on average across the country, according to the nonpartisan Urban Institute.When the temporary pay raise goes away, Pasternak and other Nevada doctors will see their fees drop from $75 on average to less than $50 for routine office visits.
Just as millions of people are gaining insurance through Medicaid, the program is poised to make deep cuts in payments to many doctors, prompting some physicians and consumer advocates to warn that the reductions could make it more difficult for Medicaid patients to obtain care. The Affordable Care Act provided a big increase in Medicaid payments for primary care in 2013 and 2014. But the increase expires Thursday ? just weeks after the Obama administration told the Supreme Court that doctors and other providers had no legal right to challenge the adequacy of payments they received from Medicaid.