National hospital chain Tenet Healthcare is considering replacing local independent doctor groups with a large national physician staffing company at some or all of its 12 California facilities. Doctors in Orange County and across the state fret that bringing in an entirely new group from out of state to manage three different sets of physicians could disrupt established relationships between them and their hospitals and usher in a new era of penny pinching that would reduce staff levels and doctors' pay. Earlier this year, Tenet notified medical staff at its California hospitals that it was thinking about terminating current contracts with emergency room, anesthesiologist and hospital specialty doctor groups in order to bring in a single company that could provide physicians for all of those functions.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to revisit a ruling that struck down the ObamaCare subsidies issued through the federal exchange. The announcement of the second hearing is a victory for the Obama administration, which suffered a defeat in late July, when a three-judge panel threw out the subsidies, ruling they were not legitimate under the Affordable Care Act. The en banc order issued Thursday vacates the judges' July decision, eliminating, at least temporarily, a circuit split in the matter that could have led the Supreme Court to take up the case.
Hackers successfully breached HealthCare.gov, but no consumer information was taken from the health insurance website that serves more than 5 million Americans, the Obama administration disclosed Thursday. Instead, the hackers installed malicious software that could have been used to launch an attack on other websites from the federal insurance portal. Health and Human Services spokesman Aaron Albright said the website component that was breached had been used for testing and did not contain consumer information, such as names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and income details. The initial intrusion took place July 8, but it was not detected until Monday of last week during a manual scan of system logs.
The average cost of a benchmark ObamaCare plan is set to decrease next year in 15 major cities, according to a new study. The premium for the second-lowest-cost silver plan, which is used to determine tax credits, will go down by an average of about 1 percent, the Kaiser Family Foundation found. The changes for 2015 range from a 8.7 percent price increase in Tennessee to a 15.6 percent decrease in Denver. Each percentage represents the plan's change in cost before applying tax credits, which will help cushion the blow of most price hikes.
In Health Affairs, Jonathan Skinner, Elliot Fisher and James Weinstein note data from Castlight Health showing that the price tag on one particular cholesterol test can range from $15 to $343 — and that's just within the city of Dallas, Texas. And before anyone yells "Free Market!", these prices are rarely, if ever, published, and often they're not even the actual price people pay. If markets are going to work well, both buyers and sellers need a lot of information about how much things cost and how good they are. In health care, buyers are denied basically all of that information, and they're occasionally unconscious when the transaction is being handled.
Two former employees of the Minneapolis VA Medical Center allege they were pressured to falsify patient appointment dates and medical records to hide delays, a television station reported. In a report that aired Wednesday night, the ex-employees told KARE-TV that in some cases, they were told to falsify medical records by writing that patients had declined follow-up treatments when, in reality, they say the veterans had never been contacted. The former VA workers fear that patients' lives may be at risk because they say some cases involved suspected colon cancer. "Some of them were getting missed altogether," said Heather Rossbach, one of the former VA workers.