MedStar Health has completed its acquisition of Southern Maryland Hospital Center in Clinton, adding its 10th hospital and important territory in the emerging fight for control of Maryland's health care market. Terms were not disclosed. Concurrent with the transaction, Southern Maryland is ending its run as Maryland's only for-profit hospital. It is now a nonprofit subsidiary of MedStar, which has renamed the hospital MedStar Southern Maryland and pledged to invest at least $100 million over five years to upgrade the campus.
Concierge medicine is nothing new. But One Medical's $199 annual fee is about one-tenth what many established concierge practices charge. The office takes most major insurance carriers, but no Medicaid patients. For those who are uninsured, there's a flat-fee schedule for doctor visits. The company has offices in San Francisco, where it started, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. It will be interesting to see how the Boston office does compared with offices in cities where there are bigger populations of young professionals who are uninsured and looking for low-cost, high-value health care. Will people want to pay the membership fee, on top of other health care costs, for internet access to lab results, e-mail communication with their doctors, and convenient appointment times?
States must commit to fully expanding their Medicaid programs to take advantage of generous funding in the federal health care law, the Obama administration said Monday. The ruling affects a federal-state program that covers nearly 60 million low-income and severely disabled people, caught in a tug-of-war between Republican governors and the Democratic administration. Under the law, the federal government will cover 100 percent of the cost of the first three years of the expansion, gradually phasing down to a 90 percent share—still a far more generous match than states have traditionally received. The expansion, scheduled for 2014, is expected to provide coverage to about half the 30 million people uninsured people who will benefit from the law.
Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too. It's a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul. The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers.
Though Exeter Hospital has fixed problems discovered after a hepatitis C outbreak last spring, federal officials say the hospital initially failed to conduct an adequate investigation. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said last week it no longer plans to terminate the hospital's Medicare funding now that multiple issues raised by inspectors have been addressed. While details of the problems weren't released after the latest inspection in September, documents provided to The Associated Press on Monday show that officials weren't satisfied with the hospital's initial response to the outbreak, among other things.
The operations of Louisiana State University's public hospitals in New Orleans, Houma and Lafayette will be turned over to nonprofit corporations that run private hospitals in the three cities under outsourcing plans unveiled Monday by Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration. The lease arrangements were announced by Health and Hospitals Secretary Bruce Greenstein and LSU hospital chief Frank Opelka as part of an administration effort to cut state costs by turning over university-run healthcare services for the poor and uninsured to the private sector. The hospitals will maintain their roles of providing safety net care for those without insurance and of training new doctors and other healthcare professionals, Greenstein said.