A typical hospital with 200 to 300 beds wastes up to $3.8 million a year, or 9.6 percent of its total budget, on readmissions of patients who shouldn't have had to come back, says Premier, a healthcare company that advises hospitals on improving efficiency and safety. The company analyzed the records of 5.8 million incidents in which a patient went back to a hospital to be re-treated and found they added $8.7 billion a year, or 15.7 percent, to the cost of caring for those people. Cutting back on these readmissions would be good news for patients. Even if the hospital has to eat the costs of additional treatments, patients are still subject to the risks of the procedures they undergo and the normal danger of contracting an infection while in the hospital.
The Obama administration is quietly diverting roughly $500 million to the IRS to help implement the president's healthcare law. The money is only part of the IRS's total implementation spending, and it is being provided outside the normal appropriations process. The tax agency is responsible for several key provisions of the new law, including the unpopular individual mandate. Republican lawmakers have tried to cut off funding to implement the healthcare law, at least until after the Supreme Court decides whether to strike it down. That ruling is expected by June, and oral arguments last week indicated the justices might well overturn at least the individual mandate, if not the whole law.
President Obama's landmark healthcare initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation's budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing. The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama approved in 2010 as the GOP trustee for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the healthcare law will reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.
A data breach initially thought to be limited to 24,000 Utahns on public health insurance is now believed to have put nearly 800,000 Utahns at risk. The Social Security numbers of up to 280,000 Utahns were exposed to hackers in the breach last week while less sensitive information—such as names and birth dates—from 500,000 others was released. State officials announced the new, dramatically higher numbers on Monday. Late last week, they had expanded their initial estimate and said the breach affected 181,604 Utahns on public health insurance, most of them kids on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. It touches one in every six Utahns, landing in the top 10 health security failures reported since late 2009 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
A data breach initially thought to be limited to 24,000 Utahns on public health insurance is now believed to have put nearly 800,000 Utahns at risk. The Social Security numbers of up to 280,000 Utahns were exposed to hackers in the breach last week while less sensitive information—such as names and birth dates—from 500,000 others was released. State officials announced the new, dramatically higher numbers on Monday. Late last week, they had expanded their initial estimate and said the breach affected 181,604 Utahns on public health insurance, most of them kids on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. It touches one in every six Utahns, landing in the top 10 health security failures reported since late 2009 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Mount Sinai opened its geriatric emergency department, or geri-ed, two months ago, modeling it in part after one at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., which opened in 2009. Hospitals also have strong financial incentives to focus on the elderly. People over 65 account for 15 percent to 20 percent of emergency room visits, hospital officials say, and that number is expected to grow as the population ages. Under the Affordable Care Act, hospitals' Medicare payments will be tied to scores on patient satisfaction surveys and how frequently patients have to be readmitted to the hospital.
In 2007, two highly trained pediatric specialists left Jackson Memorial Hospital, lured to a children's hospital in Texas that doubled their salaries. The 2007 departures of two pediatric specialists—University of Miami faculty members in the field of pediatric cardiac anesthesiology—led to an informal agreement between UM and Jackson that seemed to benefit both. Five years later, UM says Jackson, the financially struggling public healthcare system, still owes it $432,000 under the arrangement. Pediatric cardiac anesthesiologists earn, on average, $500,000 to $600,000 a year, roughly twice the pay of regular anesthesiologists because of their training.