CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Two state lawmakers introduced legislation Wednesday that's designed to help patients in North Carolina find the best prices on medical procedures. Sens. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, and Harry Brown, R-Onslow, issued a statement saying the goal is to improve medical billing transparency, reduce health care costs and help consumers make better-informed decisions about their treatment. "North Carolinians are faced with having more of their paychecks going toward health insurance premiums and more of their tax dollars funding Medicaid services," Rucho said. "They deserve to know and understand what they are paying for - and to make informed choices about their care."
LAS VEGAS — A Nevada jury was asked Wednesday to hold the state's largest health management company responsible for up to $1 billion in damages because two women contracted incurable hepatitis C during treatment at a Las Vegas outpatient medical clinic later blamed for an outbreak called the largest in U.S. history. In closing arguments, lawyers for plaintiffs Helen Meyer and Bonnie Brunson accused Health Plan of Nevada and parent company Sierra Health Services Inc. executives of disregarding evidence that clinic owner Dr. Dipak Desai had a history of endangering patients at his endoscopy clinics.
Kaiser Permanente was the only HMO to earn a top four-star rating for providing recommended care on California's annual report card, while Cigna and UnitedHealthcare led the way with three-star ratings among PPO plans. The report issued Wednesday on California's biggest HMOs and other health insurance plans showed improvement in care for children, but mixed results for treating adults with chronic medical conditions. These quality ratings and patient satisfaction scores focus on California's 10 largest HMOs, six biggest preferred-provider organization plans and 209 medical groups covering about 16 million consumers.
ATLANTA—In the small Georgia town of Demorest, Habersham Medical Center, like many rural hospitals, has seen its patient base change in a way that hurts its bottom line. As unemployment in the northeast Georgia mountains remains stubbornly high, more of the hospital's patients have no health insurance. Among those patients with private coverage, an increasing number have high-deductible policies, which means that patients must pay all or a large portion of the bills out of pocket. And a large share of patients have Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income people that often doesn't reimburse enough to cover the cost of services, hospital officials say.
RANTHAMBORE, India — The operating rooms are dark and gloomy, the power outages far too frequent; the layout is chaotic, and the recruitment of good doctors difficult. Running a rural hospital in India is a labor of love marked by shortages, budget deficits and stiff competition from witch doctors and superstition — a tiny slice of the challenge India faces as it tries to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The hospital is at the end of a steep, bad road beside Ranthambore National Park, one of India's most famous tiger reserves. The park attracts tourists from around the world, visibility that also helps bring in the occasional donation to Sevika.
Writing for medical journals is a far cry from Washington partisanship. Still, the papers are unusually impassioned and down-to-earth. And the topic, as both make clear, is anything but academic - with real-world consequences affecting the lives, and livelihoods, of millions of Americans. For hospitals, "categorically refusing to hire smokers is unethical," writes one trio of authors, among them former White House health adviser Ezekiel J. Emanuel, now a vice provost and bioethics professor at Penn. The other group, while conceding that denying jobs to smokers may be unfair, at least in the short term, argues that "the severe harms of smoking" - an estimated 440,000 deaths a year in the United States - justify more draconian policies when easier interventions don't succeed.