When Mary Donovan found out she was pregnant, she never considered going anywhere but Jackson Memorial Hospital to have her baby. Sure, the accommodations at the sprawling campus near downtown Miami don't offer the ambience of the hotel-like rooms at some hospitals. But she thought Jackson offered something better: specialists and one of the best neonatology units in the country. At 41, Donovan was among the growing number of women falling into the category of high-risk pregnancy. And that has driven up the need for hospitals like Jackson.
Hospitals need a prescription for quiet, and new research suggests it may not be easy to tamp down all the noise for a good night's sleep. Patient satisfaction surveys are packed with complaints that the clamor makes it hard to sleep. Yet remarkably little is known about exactly how that affects patients' bodies—and which types of noises are the most disruptive to shut-eye. So Ellenbogen and researchers from Harvard and the Cambridge Health Alliance recorded different kinds of hubbub in a community hospital in Boston's suburbs to try to find out.
For 14 months, a bipartisan group of 17 states quietly has been collaborating with the Obama administration to help build a foundation for the healthcare-reform law's success. They are backed by $3 million in funding from eight nonprofit organizations. Together, they have come up with a tool to help consumers navigate the health-insurance exchanges. The tool was released Friday for other states to use if they wish. The project’s nonprofit backers hope it will give all states one of the resources they will need to hit the healthcare law’s tight deadlines and provide assistance to states that have run into financial and political obstacles to moving forward.
After weeks of talks, drug industry lobbyists were growing nervous. To cut a deal with the White House on overhauling healthcare, they needed to be sure that President Obama would stop a proposal intended to bring down medicine prices. On June 3, 2009, one of the lobbyists e-mailed Nancy-Ann DeParle, the president's healthcare adviser. Ms. DeParle reassured the lobbyist. Central to Mr. Obama’s drive to remake the nation's healthcare system was an unlikely collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry that forced unappealing trade-offs.
Giant aquariums now soothe pediatric patients at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. Millions of dollars in revenue now depend on improving patients' perceptions of the hospital. It was the first Monday in June, counting down to a United States Supreme Court decision that could transform the landscape of American health care. But like hospitals across the country, Maimonides is not waiting around for the verdict. Win, lose or draw in court, administrators said, the policies driving the federal health care law are already embedded in big cuts and new payment formulas that hospitals ignore at their peril.
Robert D'Amicodatri had two strokes, complicated by seizures, and rang up $374,741 in charges at Crozer-Chester Medical Center early in 2009. Three years later, in February, the Delaware County hospital sued him for $241,321, the balance after an insurance policy paid $20,998 and the hospital reduced his bill by $112,422 for a reason it has declined to explain. D'Amicodatri's hospital bills mounted before the Affordable Care Act took effect began taking effect in 2010, but the landmark law has a provision now in effect designed to eliminate, for some uninsured or underinsured patients at least, jaw-dropping bills like D'Amicodatri's that are based on astronomical "gross charges."