Multiple agencies, including the Los Angeles city attorney's office, are investigating whether Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada's primary public mental health facility, has been systematically dumping patients across state lines for years. A Bee investigation found that the hospital had bused roughly 1,500 psychiatric patients to cities across the nation over the past five years, a third of them to California. By policy, those patients were put on buses alone, with one-way tickets out of town, a small supply of medication and several bottles of Ensure nutritional supplement for the journey.
Three years after Bayonne Medical Center's new for-profit owners bought the hospital at bankruptcy for the equivalent of $32 million, they sold its land and buildings for $58 million. Then they leased it back and continued to run the hospital — enhancing their profits through some of the highest hospital charges in the country, according to recent Medicare disclosures. It was the first example of a trend that has emerged as for-profit companies acquire more New Jersey hospitals. Already, hospital properties in Secaucus, Hoboken and Bayonne are owned by real estate investors, with more deals possible in Passaic and elsewhere.
WASHINGTON — Republican opposition in many statehouses to expanding Medicaid next year under President Obama's healthcare law — opposition that could leave millions of the nation's poorest residents without insurance coverage — will likely widen the divide between the nation's healthiest and sickest states. With nearly every GOP-leaning state on track to reject an expansion of the government health plan for the poor, the healthcare law's goal of guaranteed insurance will become a reality next year mostly in traditionally liberal and moderate states. These states already have higher rates of health coverage.
As the baby boomer generation grows old and if the number of elderly care workers fails to grow with it, many people might end up being cared for by robots. According to the Health and Human Services Department, there will be 72.1 million Americans over the age of 65 by 2030, which is nearly double the number today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country will need 70 percent more home aide jobs by 2020, long before that bubble of retirees. But filling those jobs is proving to be difficult because the salaries are low. In many states, in-home aides make an average of $20,820 annually.
We all know that Stein's Law will someday apply to health care spending, which has risen from 5 percent of the economy (gross domestic product) in 1960 to almost 18 percent now. What we don't know is how and when its share of the economy will stabilize. Will this result from spending controls imposed by Washington; or from delivery-system "reforms" that spontaneously cut "waste"; or from rationing, which limits spending by denying people treatment; or by some combination of these? As for when, could it be now?
Watson, IBM's supercomputer named after company founder Thomas Watson, was on Capitol Hill Thursday to show off what it has learned since it dove into health care roughly a year ago. "I thought I was coming up to play chess with a computer," said Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) as he took the podium in the House Energy and Commerce committee room during an event hosted by IBM and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), vice chair of the committee. But the now-famous servers were nowhere in sight, since Watson's computing power is now accessible to authorized users through the cloud.