T. Mark Jones learned about the costs and benefits of health-care delivery when he treated AIDS patients in Key West, Florida, in the late 1980s. The pharmacy he co-founded -- unusual at the time -- provided a humane last step for gay men who didn't want to spend their final weeks confined to a hospital. Jones, a registered nurse, went into homes to dispense infusion-therapy drugs and teach patients to care for themselves. His dream job began to unravel in 1991, when a national health-care chain came to Key West to open an AIDS clinic. It secured the support of local doctors by offering them padded insurance reimbursements, Jones says, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its September issue.
They came to cure — but they made a killing. Mount Sinai School
of Medicine lured top medical talent from around the country by doling out large interest-free loans that allowed coveted professors to score big in the New York real estate market. Since 2008, the highly ranked Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has given six- and seven-figure mortgages to at least three sought-after physicians, according to records obtained by the Daily News. The tender loving care extends to the payback as well.
If you buy your own health insurance, you've no doubt heard that subsidies will be available next year to help pay the premiums. But will you get a subsidy and how much? Researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation have a report out Wednesday that provides some insight. Based on their analysis, about 48 percent of adults currently purchasing coverage for themselves will be eligible for subsidies next year – and those subsidies will average $5,548 per family. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.) Because that figure is an average, some families will get more and some will receive less when they enroll through new online marketplaces, which open Oct. 1.
WASHINGTON — In another setback for President Obama's health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care. The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.
Hospitals across the nation are being swept up in the biggest wave of mergers since the 1990s, a development that is creating giant hospital systems that could one day dominate American health care and drive up costs. The consolidations are being driven by a confluence of powerful forces, not least of which is President Obama's signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act. That law, many experts say, is transforming the economics of health care and pushing a growing number of hospitals into the arms of suitors. The changes are unfolding with remarkable speed. Two big for-profit hospital chains, Community Health Systems of Tennessee and Health Management Associates of Florida, are combining in a $7.6 billion deal.
Some of the millions of poor people expected to lose out on Obamacare coverage next year because their states are not expanding Medicaid might have a way to get help, but the strategy carries risk. Experts say the key is for them to project their 2014 income to at least the federal poverty level, about $11,500 per person or $23,500 for a family of four. That would entitle them to federal subsidies that would cover nearly all the cost of private coverage sold on new online insurance marketplaces set up by the federal health law. The subsidies are available on a sliding scale to people making between the poverty level and four times that amount.