St. Francis Medical Center, one of Ouachita Parish's largest private employers, plans to cut about 300 jobs before the end of the year. In a statement from the hospital on Tuesday, St. Francis said it would offer about 300 employees a voluntary workforce adjustment compensation package that would voluntarily end their employment before the end of the year. The News-Star reports the hospital also is considering a consolidation that would close its downtown campus and consolidate its operations into the St. Francis North hospital on U.S. 165 North. That decision is expected to be made this fall.
Health care spending has, for decades, followed a consistent pattern. America pays more and more for health care — and gets less and less. Between 1990 and 2012, the insured rate in the United States fell two percentage points, from 86.6 to 84.6 percent. If the insured rate had just held steady, six million more people would have been covered in 2012. While we were covering less people, we kept spending more on health care. National health spending, over that time period, rose from 12 percent of the economy in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2012. Adjusted for inflation, health-care spending rose from $1.1 trillion to $2.8 trillion over those 22 years.
Small interactions like these make hospitals safer for children by reducing rates of hospital-acquired infections. Now a new article shows exactly how much safer. Children are getting far fewer infections in American hospitals, according to a very large study released this week in the journal Pediatrics. From 2007 to 2012, using data collected in 173 U.S. hospitals and over five million days of hospitalization, investigators tracked rates of multiple hospital infections, including bloodstream infections among children with intravenous lines and pneumonias in children on mechanical ventilators. The results were impressive. They found that children developed bloodstream infections from intravenous lines less than a third as often as they did five years earlier.
The cost of employer health coverage continued its muted growth this year with a 3% increase that pushed the average annual premium for a family plan to $16,834, according to a major survey. The increase was slightly less than the 4% seen last year, according to the annual poll of employers performed by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation along with the Health Research & Educational Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the American Hospital Association. The share of the family-plan premium borne by employees was $4,823, or 29% of the total, the same percentage as last year. [Subscription Required]
Lots of people shopping in the new health care marketplaces this year picked health plans that limited their choice of doctors and hospitals. The plans were popular because they tended to cost less than more conventional plans that covered nearly every health care provider in a region. The proliferation of these more limited plans, called narrow networks, has worried consumer advocates and insurance regulators. The concern is that people will struggle to find the care they need if their choices are limited. Maybe we don't have to worry so much. A new study suggests that, done right, a narrow network can succeed in saving money and helping certain patients get appropriate health care.
The House on Tuesday passed legislation to delay enforcement of supervision requirements for outpatient therapeutic services in certain hospitals. Passed by voice vote, the bill would prevent the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from requiring Critical Access Hospitals and small rural hospitals from needing a physician to supervise therapeutic services like drawing blood. CMS began enforcing the rule in January. Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kansas), the measure's sponsor, said the requirement unnecessarily burdened small hospitals who may lack the resources. "This is a change in policy that will put a strain on providers while providing no quality improvements for the patients they serve," Jenkins said.