Massachusetts General Hospital wanted its 22,000 employees to watch an 11-minute video teaching the basics of customer service. But executives felt it would send a strange message to make niceness training mandatory—and then penalize staff for not participating. So instead, they offered employees a $250 bonus to view the video, an approach common in other industries and that proved to be an overwhelming success for the hospital.
Every corner of the healthcare world has something—and potentially a lot ? to lose from the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to hit the government on March 1. Doctors and hospitals say the sequester's Medicare cuts will cost their industries more than 200,000 jobs just this year. With the cuts looking increasingly inevitable, healthcare industries that have spent the past year lobbying Congress to cancel the sequester are now turning their attention toward absorbing its cuts.
A new bipartisan deficit-reduction plan to slash a massive $600 billion from US health-care spending over two decades has policy experts scratching their heads over how such an ambitious target can be reached. Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson have yet to declare what they would do to wring savings from Medicare, Medicaid and other programs, according to analysts who provide the two deficit hawks with their facts and figures. Those ideas will be laid out in a detailed plan due to be issued at some point over the coming weeks.
One of the biggest threats to the success of President Obama's health care law comes from shortages of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. But a 15-member commission created to investigate the problem has never met in two and a half years because it has no money from Congress or the administration. With an aging population and 30 million people expected to gain coverage under Mr. Obama's health care law, the demand for medical care is expected to increase. But Dr. Sheldon M. Retchin, the vice chairman of the panel, the National Health Care Workforce Commission, said, "We are prohibited from meeting and discussing these issues."
Almost overnight, Florida has gone from being an ardent opponent of the federal health-care law to a laboratory for an ambitious experiment under it. If state lawmakers back Gov. Rick Scott's plan to expand Medicaid, it will be an experiment with a determinedly free-market twist. Scott's turnabout on Medicaid last Wednesday came a few hours after the federal government tentatively approved his application to fully privatize the federal-state program for the poor.
There are company towns, and then there's Rochester—where waiters make meal recommendations based on what sort of blood work you're having drawn at Mayo Clinic the next morning. So when Mayo announced this month that it wants to spend billions of dollars to expand its facilities and remake this quietly prosperous city of 100,000 into a vibrant destination spot for Mayo's global clientele, that hit the top of Rochester's agenda, too. Mayo employs more than 34,000 people—one-third of the city's population. If you try to play the Mayo version of six degrees of separation with anyone in Rochester, it's going to be a pretty short game.