Two prominent California hospitals will be allowed to perform cardiac catheterization in outpatient buildings thanks to legislation approved on Friday. Such procedures have been allowed only in main hospital buildings, but supporters say they can now be done safely in new outpatient buildings planned for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. The California Nurses Assn. fiercely opposed the bill, saying there would be fewer safeguards if something goes wrong during a procedure. It also pointed out that outpatient buildings don’t need to meet the same standards for earthquake safety.
Duke LifePoint Healthcare announced today it will pump $350 million into Marquette General in Michigan. Duke LifePoint closed on the purchase of the hospital today. The partnership will use the money for capital improvement projects and physician recruitment slated to take place over the next decade. Proposed projects include a new outpatient surgery center, a comprehensive cancer center, private patient rooms and new technology, according to the group.
Proponents promised lower rates for all Maine residents, with increased competition among insurers. But six months after the state's rules took effect, no new insurers have entered the state—and health insurance premiums have gone up for the vast majority of small businesses. The results have been mixed for individuals: Everyone under 40 saw rate cuts, while most people over 55 received increases, some as high as 18 percent, according to an analysis of state data released Tuesday by advocacy group Consumers for Affordable Health Care, which opposed the law changes. Overall, a little more than half of individuals saw their rates rise, albeit by a relatively low 1.7 percent average.
Seventeen states offer tax incentives to people who donate a kidney, a portion of their liver or bone marrow for transplantation. Researchers looked at what happened in the years before and after these tax incentives were passed and found no increase in organ donation rates. A recent NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll found that 60 percent of Americans support some kind of financial incentive to organ donors that could be applied to healthcare needs. But the new report raises a caution about how much to expect from financial incentives. But there may be other reasons why the tax breaks aren't working, they say. For one thing, they may just be too small.
An effort by three healthcare organizations that saved the California Public Employees' Retirement System $37 million in the last two years is gaining national attention as Medicare and employers search for ways to control rising medical costs. Blue Shield of California teamed up with the Dignity Health hospital chain, previously known as Catholic Healthcare West, and Hill Physicians Medical Group to coordinate care for 41,000 CalPERS members in the Sacramento area, starting in 2010.
Mostly because of money. Under a fee-for-service system, seeing patients more quickly means more revenue. But not much of that extra money makes its way to physicians—especially primary care doctors; adjusted for inflation, physician incomes have actually gone down in the past 15 years. Instead, it goes toward a bloated, inefficient system that often does not make us healthier. With payments tightening from private insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid, doctors are pressured to cram more and more patients into a day’s schedule to keep practices afloat. The result: You have a situation in which most primary care doctors I know feel like Lucy and Ethel working at that ever speedier candy-making conveyor belt.