(Reuters) - Five medical workers have been fired over a patient data breach at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Los Angeles facility said in a statement, while celebrity website TMZ reported on Saturday that the hacking effort targeted reality star Kim Kardashian. Cedars-Sinai, a favorite destination for celebrities seeking medical care, said in the statement it has a "high standard for security" and "in this case that standard was violated." Kardashian, the star of the reality television show "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," gave birth on June 15 at Cedars-Sinai to daughter North West, whose father is Grammy-winning rap star Kanye West.
Health insurer WellPoint Inc agreed to pay a fine of $1.7 million for allowing health and other personal information from hundreds of thousands of people to be accessed over the Internet, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday. Security weaknesses in a WellPoint online application database exposed information for 612,402 individuals between October 2009 and March 2010, according to the agency. Data included names, dates of birth, addresses, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and health information. WellPoint, the second largest U.S. health insurer, agreed to the fine to settle potential violations of healthcare privacy laws.
The pending return of healthcare giant Tenet Healthcare Corp. to Massachusetts has the potential to shake up the state's hospitals and doctors networks, which are already rapidly consolidating. The for-profit system, which owns 49 hospitals in 11 states, will enter a marketplace much changed from the one it left in 2004, when the chain sold Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester and the MetroWest Medical Center hospitals in Framingham and Natick to Vanguard Health Systems Inc. for $126.7 million. By agreeing last month to buy for-profit Vanguard for about $1.8 billion—a deal that will bring the three Massachusetts hospitals back into the Tenet fold—Dallas-based Tenet signaled that it has become more aggressive about expanding nationally.
This isn't the first time a major health law has gotten off to a rocky start. In the beginning, things didn't look so good for the now very successful Medicare prescription drug law, either. "About this time in 2005, the percentage of people who had an unfavorable opinion of the law was actually higher than those who had a favorable opinion," says Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. Corlette, who recently co-authored a paper on the lessons learned from the implementation of the Medicare drug law, says many of the same complaints being made about the Affordable Care Act today were also made about the Medicare drug program then. The Medicare invited private insurance plans to compete to offer prescription drug coverage to seniors and the disabled.
Robert Bauer is young, lean and healthy—just the kind of person the government wants to buy into its new health insurance exchanges. Bauer though, doesn't see the need. The 24—year—old works in organic farm fields three days a week, and prides himself on eating well. He's uninsured now and doesn't plan to buy coverage this fall in the exchanges, a key part of the federal overhaul of health programs in the Affordable Care Act. Bauer may not worry about a health crisis, but the people building insurance exchanges worry about Bauer and the millions of other healthy Americans who they fear may simply opt out. They need those younger, low-risk people to pay premiums to offset the costs of covering older, sicker Americans.
Bill Gracey, CEO of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee told a business crowd at a Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce event yesterday, sees a need for healthcare reform, pointing specifically to issues with access and spiraling costs in the U.S. The challenge, he said, is that the current round of reform only approaches the access issue, not costs. The company expects anywhere from 20 to 30 percent increase in rates in the individual market starting next year, and a 10 percent increase in the small group market. Contributing to that increase is a new tax on payers in the law, totaling $220 million in the first year alone. As Gracey pointed out, that's about on par, or more, than the company's annual profit, and will have to be taken from premiums, which in turn will hike up rates.