Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs will become part of University of Colorado Health, voters in the Front Range city decided Tuesday. Voters approved the lease of the city-owned hospital to UCH, a partnership comprised of University of Colorado Hospital and Poudre Valley Health System, passing the measure with an 82 percent approval rating. The vote means UCH will pay $1.7 billion over the life of the contract, including $74 million upfront. The addition of Memorial Hospital gives the health care group a presence from Colorado Springs to the Wyoming border. PVHS spent $300,000 in preparation of the Colorado Springs election.
Health insurance is expensive, costing employers $15,073 on average to cover one worker and the employee’s family. If companies with more than 50 workers stopped offering coverage, they would face a fine that is significantly smaller than that cost, at $2,000 per employee. Which makes this Towers-Watson survey all the more surprising: The consulting firm polled 512 companies that employed more than 1,000 workers each. These are companies that spend at least $5 million in health benefits annually. They were asked how likely it was that they would drop coverage in 2014 and send employers to the new health care exchanges being created to accommodate the law. Not a single employer said that scenario was "very likely." A mere 3 percent ranked it "somewhat likely."
The state announced yesterday the five health plans that have been selected to serve as many as 115,000 low-income seniors in Ohio enrolled in both Medicaid and Medicare. The managed-care contracts are worth up to $3.7 billion in Medicaid business alone. State officials did not have cost estimates for the Medicare program. Aetna Better Health of Ohio, Molina Healthcare, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Ohio, Buckeye Community Health Plan Inc. and Caresource will manage care for "dual eligibles" in the Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Akron-Canton, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown areas.
Knowing the truth about the plight of the LSU Health System and being willing to speak out about it set Dr. Fred Cerise free from his position as head of the 10-hospital system. Cerise joined a growing list of administrators who have been fired after not following the party line drawn by Gov. Bobby Jindal. Because Cerise was not directly a Jindal administration official, the governor could not fire him. He worked for the LSU Board of Supervisors and William Jenkins, interim system president and interim chancellor of the flagship campus in Baton Rouge. But the governor has appointed almost every member of that board.
Palo Alto resident Ed Lee routinely negotiates for his own healthcare services, everything from the cost of a scan to an urgent-care visit—often securing discounts of 30 to 50 percent off the original charges. Lee, 61, a self-employed public relations expert in the semiconductor industry, started bypassing his health insurance and paying out of pocket last year when he realized that premiums and deductibles were costing him more than $12,000 before his insurer paid a dime. With that decision, Lee became part of a new breed of healthcare consumer—people who pay such a large portion of their health costs that they're questioning the value of insurance.
Politico has obtained a draft of the 2012 proposal and, for healthcare, four years has meant a sea change. The Republican party now throws its weight behind a complete restructuring of both entitlement programs. Since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, they have operated as insurance plans where subscribers receive a set amount of benefits. The Republican plan calls for a fundamental change to that structure. They want to set a specific budget for the program and then have seniors and states figure out what benefits they can purchase. The concept of "defined benefit" gets thrown out the window. "This is the only way," the platform says, "to limit costs and restore consumer choice for patients."