DaVita HealthCare Partners said Tuesday it will pay $389 million to settle criminal and civil anti-kickback investigations and plans to end joint ventures with kidney doctors involving 28 dialysis clinics. Denver-based DaVita's CEO, Kent Thiry, announced in an earnings call with shareholders that the company has "agreed to a framework" for settling federal investigations into some of the company's relationships with kidney doctors' offices. He said the exact settlement still is being finalized, but that both he and federal attorneys expect to hammer out the details in coming months.
President Obama said Tuesday the latest delay in implementing his healthcare law is an example of "smoothing out this transition" for a small group of midsize businesses struggling to meet the requirement that they provide health insurance to their employees. "It may take them some time, even if they're operating in good faith," Obama said at a White House news conference. "The purpose of the law is not to punish them, it's simply to make sure that they are either providing health insurance to their employees or that they're helping to bear the cost of their employees getting health insurance."
Parkland Memorial Hospital plans to restore incentive pay for nearly 60 top executives by adding up to $5.4 million in potential pay next year. But the hospital's board of managers treaded carefully Monday as the "pay-for-performance" program was outlined. Officials stressed repeatedly that the payments should not be viewed as bonuses since they would be tied to performance measures. Each manager would have to meet specific goals to get a full or partial payment. "The plan is not a bonus system," said Paul Leslie, an executive vice president and general counsel. "Actual bonuses would be unlawful."
More than 90 percent of all Medicare spending goes to treating the two-thirds of beneficiaries who suffer from more than one chronic health problem. Giving these people better care for the dollar is the key to increasing the value of the program overall. This is why new legislation introduced in the Senate by Democrat Ron Wyden and Republican Johnny Isakson and in the House by Democrat Peter Welch and Republican Erik Paulsen is so encouraging. The Better Care, Lower Cost Act of 2014 would increase the odds that the slowdown in Medicare spending, noted in the most recent Congressional Budget Office data, continues to roll on, by nudging the system further from the fee-for-service model.
An intensive care unit nurse in a small-town hospital on Maryland's scenic Eastern Shore suspected that a patient had necrotizing fasciitis, the so-called "flesh-eating" disease. The condition is rare. Even experienced intensive care doctors seldom see it, and, since it was nighttime, no such physician was in the ICU. Pinning down the diagnosis was critical?and in this case Berlin, Md.'s Atlantic General Hospital had back-up. A critical care doctor 125 miles away was monitoring the patient's health via voice, video and high-speed data lines constantly streaming information about vital signs, medications, test results and X-rays, a telemedicine service known as Maryland eCare.
It may take weeks to render a verdict on the Obama administration's latest health care concession to employers. But that could make a difference for Democrats battling to keep control of the Senate in the fall congressional elections. All-important details are buried in more than 200 pages of dense Treasury regulations released Monday. The biggest change is that medium-sized firms got another delay in a heavily criticized requirement that they cover their workers or face fines. The administration said companies with 50 to 99 employees will have an additional year to comply, until January 1, 2016. For businesses with 100 or more employees, the so-called employer mandate will still take effect in 2015.