South Carolina lawmakers say they have found a way to stop implementation of the U.S. Affordable Care Act in their state, an effort that could provide a template for other Republican-led legislatures looking to derail the federal program. The proposed measure would ban state agencies from helping carry out President Barack Obama's signature healthcare reform law and prevent federal money flowing through state coffers from being spent on it, said Republican state Senator Tom Davis. The legislation would give South Carolina oversight of insurance rates offered through its federal exchange and require healthcare navigators, which help people sign up for the healthcare benefits, to be licensed by the state, said Davis, who chairs the committee drafting the measure.
The first thing Andy Slavitt did to fix the federal government's failing health insurance website was require representatives of every contractor on the project to work in the same location 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Then, he made them all share information with each other. "The good news about a tight deadline is that you only have time for the pragmatic and the practical," said Slavitt, a leader at Optum, theUnitedHealth Group Inc. subsidiary that oversaw repairs to HealthCare.gov, the federal health portal. The government rewarded Optum's success on the project with a contract extension over the weekend.
The head of Harris County's public health system and two out-of-state physicians with administrative experience are the top candidates for Parkland Memorial Hospital's CEO job. The Parkland board of managers confirmed Monday that it narrowed its search after meeting with six potential candidates in recent weeks. A previous slate of four candidates was made public in late 2012. None got the job. The board is seeking to replace Dr. Ron Anderson. He was forced to step down as president and CEO in December 2011 amid Parkland's regulatory problems.
Even as Dr. Richard F. Salluzzo abruptly left his CEO position at Cape Cod Healthcare more than three years ago, he was due to receive more than $2 million in compensation. Reports filed with the state attorney general's office for fiscal 2012 and 2011 show that Salluzzo remained Cape Cod Healthcare's highest-paid employee those years, despite the fact that he left just two months into fiscal 2011. Salluzzo earned $1,309,308 for fiscal 2011 and $1,095,342 for fiscal 2012, according to forms filed with the attorney general's nonprofit/public charities division. Cape Cod Healthcare's fiscal year starts Oct. 1.
On December 27, I closed MDPrevent, the preventive-medical practice that I co-founded three years ago in Delray Beach, Florida. The practice was created with the premise that patients would be better off if doctors focused their attention more on preventing disease than simply treating it. In clinical parlance, "primary prevention" means preventing disease occurrence, while "secondary prevention" means early diagnosis and treatment of existing disease before it causes significant harm. The thrust of MDPrevent was primary prevention: to help patients identify their risk factors for the major chronic diseases and leading killers, such as diabetes, heart and lung disease, stroke, and cancer, and to help them make lifestyle changes to prevent these factors from evolving to illness.
People signing up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act's federal and state marketplaces tend to be older and potentially less healthy, officials said Monday, a demographic mix that could threaten the law's economic underpinnings and cause premiums to rise in the future if the pattern persists. Questions about the law's financial viability are likely to become the next line of attack from its critics, as lawmakers gear up for the midterm elections this fall. Republicans quickly seized on the government's progress report on Monday as evidence that the health insurance law would not work.