Hospital CEOs' pay isn't linked to their hospital's benefit to the community. Nor is it linked to the quality of care the hospital provides, a new study found. Instead, the chief executive officers, or CEOs, tended to earn more at hospitals with high patient satisfaction ratings and advanced technology. "I was hoping I'd see even some modest relationship with quality performance," said Dr. Ashish Jha. "I think we were a little disappointed." Jha worked on the study at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. He and his colleagues combined data from tax returns, hospital surveys and performance and cost reports.
When Barbara Retkowski went to a Cape Coral, Florida, health clinic in August to treat a blood condition, she figured the center would bill her insurance company. Instead, it demanded payment upfront. Earlier in the year, another clinic insisted she pay her entire remaining insurance deductible for the year -- more than $1,000 -- before the doctor would even see her. "I was surprised and frustrated," Retkowski, a 59-year-old retiree, said in an interview. "I had to pull money out of my savings." The practice of upfront payment for non-emergency care has been spreading in the U.S. as deductibles rise. Now, the advent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is likely to accelerate that trend.
A Maine nurses group on Monday said President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, which is criticized by conservatives as overreaching, doesn't go far enough toward universal health coverage. The Maine State Nurses Association held Monday afternoon health screenings and an evening "town hall" event at the First Parish Church on Congress Street in Portland to advocate for the expansion of the federal Medicare program to cover all Americans, regardless of age. The organization is planning to hold a second wave of screenings and another town hall event Tuesday afternoon and evening at the Bangor Public Library.
Dignity Health, which operates dozens of hospitals in Arizona, California and Nevada, and giant tech vendor Optum have formed a joint venture to simplify vexing complexities in the realm of hospital billing and cost transparency. Dignity, based in San Francisco, will be the new venture's first client, reports sister paper, the San Francisco Business Times. Optum is a health care IT and technology unit of giant UnitedHealthcare. Both are divisions of Minneapolis-based UnitedHealth Group.
Ben Olmedo traveled from Afghanistan to Alaska to find the gaps he wanted to fill. Wisconsin-born Carrie Kowalski found her niche in Venice Beach, Calif. And Vicki Chan-Padgett found her space full of needy women and children in Las Vegas 30 years after she first trained as an Air Force medic. The three physician assistants are already helping to fill the many holes in the U.S. health care system, providing tests, counseling and other basic care when a doctor is unavailable. They expect to get busier as health care reform starts making it easier for people to pay for medical care.
For more than a century, researchers were puzzled by the uncanny ability of cancer cells to evade the immune system. They knew cancer cells were grotesquely abnormal and should be killed by white blood cells. In the laboratory, in Petri dishes, white blood cells could go on the attack against cancer cells. Why, then, could cancers survive in the body? The answer, when it finally came in recent years, arrived with a bonus: a way to thwart a cancer's strategy. Researchers discovered that cancers wrap themselves in an invisible protective shield. And they learned that they could break into that shield with the right drugs.