North Mississippi Health Services in Tupelo has laid off 109 employees. A statement from a NMHS says Monday's cuts are across the board. The hospital has declined to give specific numbers or positions being eliminated. Chief medical officer Dr. Mark Williams says the reductions were prompted by the ongoing shift from inpatient to outpatient care, declining government reimbursements and other factors. The cuts represent almost 2 percent of the company's total workforce, most of who work at North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo. NMHS currently has 6,190 employees system-wide.
In May 2013, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released CMS Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) inpatient data that contain discharge information for 100% of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries using hospital inpatient services. This data shows what more than 3,200 hospitals in the United States were being paid for the most frequently performed 100 inpatient procedures. The variations were extraordinary. Some hospitals in the New York State were being paid 40 times as much as the world-famous Mayo clinic for some treatments. This kind of variation is understandably a huge cause of concern at a time when health care costs are widely seen to be spinning out of control.
Confident that repairs to its HealthCare.gov website are progressing as planned, the Obama administration has begun notifying some 275,000 people who couldn't enroll in coverage at the troubled website's Oct. 1 debut to try again. "Those consumers who have perhaps created an account, but not submitted an application; those consumers who have submitted an application, but not selected a plan; those would be the kinds of individuals that we anticipate reaching out to and speaking with directly over time," said Julie Bataille, the communications director for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
New U.S. guidelines on heart health that were a decade in the making recommend stronger measures for patients at particularly high risk of heart attack or stroke, including more aggressive therapy with drugs that lower cholesterol or even weight loss surgery. The guidelines issued by two leading U.S. medical organizations on Tuesday are likely to be followed by cardiologists and primary care physicians, as well as influence insurance coverage. The guidelines dropped an emphasis on specific targets for lowering "bad" LDL cholesterol levels and suggest that individual patient risk of developing heart disease rather than a LDL number should be used to determine the need for more intensive treatment with cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.
Amid an uproar over widespread cancellations of health insurance policies, Anthem Blue Cross of California said it is granting a two-month extension through February to 104,000 customers. California's largest for-profit insurer is offering more time to a small portion of its canceled policyholders because the insurance giant didn't send termination notices in time under state rules. This move comes at a time when an estimated 1 million Californians and several million more nationwide stand to lose their existing health insurance at the end of the year because it doesn't meet all the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
On the cusp of the Affordable Care Act mandating most Americans to have health insurance next year, a rise in doctors who don't take insurance might seem paradoxical. But health-care experts say the two forces go hand in hand, as patients may find concierge doctors more accessible, especially if traditional doctors get flooded with more patients. Also fueling the trend is a little-known clause tucked into the health-care law that allows direct primary-care to count as ACA-compliant insurance, as long as it is bundled with a "wraparound" catastrophic medical policy to cover emergencies.