Patients who end up with hefty medical bills now have another payment option: an interest-free loan without the worry of a credit check. As patients' deductibles continue to rise, leaving them unable to pay for services in one lump sum, health finance experts say hospital officials are looking for creative ways to collect on patient balances. Five months ago, SSM Health Care inked a deal with Commerce Bank to offer these interest-free loans with three- and five-year terms to patients in the health system's four-state footprint — Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.
Bayonne Medical Center wasn't just bragging about efficiency when it posted a big digital clock on a highway billboard a few years ago to show the real-time waits in its emergency room. It wanted patients to come to its ER. Lots of patients. It didn't matter if the hospital was in the patient's insurance network. On the contrary, to the businessmen who had recently purchased the medical center, those "out-of-network" patients held the key to reversing Bayonne's fortunes. These owners, who bought the hospital in bankruptcy, had found an unintended — and very profitable — consequence to a state regulation that was designed to protect patients with urgent medical needs.
Once Pennsylvania Insurance Department officials sign off on Highmark's transition plan for separating from UPMC, Highmark members may learn they have more access to UPMC physicians and facilities than they expected — but it could come at a very steep price. They also may soon become familiar with a new term: chargemaster. The chargemaster is a hospital's master list of how much it will charge for services, including every treatment, test, scan and aspirin. But, unlike a restaurant that lists meal prices on a menu, the hospital prices are secret and — almost uniformly — many times higher than what the service actually cost the hospital to provide.
States running their own Affordable Care Act marketplaces enrolled more people in health insurance than those using the federal marketplace, according to an analysis by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Leonard Davis Institute. Given the federal Website's dreadful October launch, that isn't exactly jaw-dropping news. But Penn's Health Insurance Exchange researchers were surprised to find that even after Healthcare.gov began working well in December, state-based marketplaces kept outperforming the federal site. This is of local interest since both Pennsylvania and New Jersey opted to use the federal exchange and not run their own sites.
Community Health Systems announced Aug. 18 that hackers had breached its health care network of 206 facilities and stolen sensitive information on approximately 4.5 million patients. The compromise and subsequent data loss is part of a general trend in the sector. The health care industry has given short shrift to IT security, spending less on protecting its systems and data than most, if not all other, industries, as measured as a percentage of the overall IT budget. And data from firms that track threat intelligence shows that signs of breaches are rampant in the health care industry.
Minneapolis medical clinic is closing, largely because more people are obtaining health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and seeking care elsewhere. Minnesota Public Radio News reports the Neighborhood Involvement Program provides medical care to thousands of uninsured and underinsured people. While 3,000 patients will be without a medical provider when it shuts down Friday, its dental and mental health clinics and senior and youth programs will continue. Because of the Affordable Care Act, some clients now have health insurance through MNSure, the state's online insurance marketplace. Others qualified for Medicaid when the state expanded eligibility to 35,000 low-income adults.