Perched on farms and open space along Interstate 55, huge billboards tout the services of Cape Girardeau's billion-dollar health care industry. Two rival hospitals, St. Francis Medical Center and Southeast Hospital, brag about gleaming buildings, robotic surgery systems, electrophysiology labs for heart care, and cancer treatment centers. For at least a decade, the crosstown rivals have engaged in a costly race to build new facilities, invest in leading edge technologies, buy new equipment, recruit physicians and offer new services. Rather than reducing charges as a way to lure patients, the hospitals instead have undertaken fierce advertising campaigns, and end up spending more on marketing than on medical care for the needy, called charity care. In the case of St. Francis, the hospital spent more than four times as much on advertising and promotions as it did on charity care in 2011.
Federal and state officials are investigating whether healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente violated patient privacy in its work with an Indio couple who stored nearly 300,000 confidential hospital records for the company. The California Department of Public Health has already determined that Kaiser "failed to safeguard all patients' medical records" at one Southern California hospital by giving files to Stephan and Liza Dean for about seven months without a contract. The couple's document storage firm kept those patient records at a warehouse in Indio that they shared with another man's party rental business and his Ford Mustang until 2010.
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration's health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers. Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
The New Year's Day "fiscal cliff" deal means at least an extra $450,000 this year to tiny Jones Memorial Hospital in rural upstate New York. "It's very good news," said Eva Benedict, chief executive of the 70-bed hospital in Wellsville, N.Y., a town of 7,000 people near the Pennsylvania border. While much of the hospital industry has lamented the deal reached between Congress and the White House because it will pay only about half the $30 billion bill to avert a 27 percent Medicare fee cut for physicians, the agreement was cause for celebration for about 200 small, rural hospitals. That's because it extended for one year a program that pays up to several million dollars each year to hospitals such as Jones Memorial because they have fewer than 100 beds, are located in rural areas and treat a high proportion of Medicare patients.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan officials hoped to start the new year with an operational overhaul that included ending its tax-exempt status, changing how it's regulated and transforming itself from a charitable trust to a customer-owned nonprofit. Instead, they're beginning 2013 doing what they did in the final months of 2012: Lobbying state lawmakers and the governor to act.
At a mid-November conference in Sacramento on implementation of the federal health care overhaul in 2014, California Health and Human Services Secretary Diana Dooley outlined the political aspects of the task ahead. There is much to be worked out, such as a Medi-Cal expansion expected to add up to 1 million new enrollees by including all those with incomes up to 138 percent of federal poverty guidelines. Governor Jerry Brown is expected to call a special session of the Legislature this month to deal with implementation issues. But perhaps nothing will make or break the success of the overhaul in California, and the public's perception of it, than the performance of the state-run health benefit exchange, Connect California. By Oct. 1, it must have an online insurance marketplace up and running, with the expectation of signing up about 1 million enrollees before the end of 2014.