Selina Hodge is tired of being on kidney dialysis for nine hours a day and still feeling sick, so she is taking a long shot: She is begging for a kidney donor -- on Craigslist. The practice is legal, has been done for years and succeeds on occasion. The Palm Beach Gardens woman, 28, said she fears that just being on the waiting list at the University of Miami transplant center won't save her. "The doctor told me since I'm young and have been on dialysis for awhile, it's a priority that I get a kidney. Scary thing I found out is that being on dialysis can cause heart problems. Please help me!" Hodge said in her Craigslist note. Hodge is trying to tap the throngs who visit Craigslist to see the 50 million classified ads posted every month, most of which are peddling items and services.
The $29.1 billion cash and stock offer by Express Scripts for Medco Health Solutions is not just one of the largest deals of the year. It is also a huge antitrust roll of the dice. The combination would create a behemoth in the pharmacy benefits management industry. So much so, it looks like a provocation to trustbusters. Express Scripts, led by George Paz, says the combination will yield $1 billion in annual cost savings. That is believable: though the two companies have similar levels of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, Express Scripts has about half as many employees.The big savings explain the 5% bounce in Express Scripts' share price on Thursday, which in turn increased the value of its offer to around $73.64 per Medco share. But the regulatory uncertainty explains why Medco shares, though up a deal-fueled 14%, settled at a relatively large 13% discount to the value of the bid. It won't be easy to convince the Federal Trade Commission that the deal will not decrease competition. The combined group would have about 35% of the market.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revealed intentions to tap predictive modeling to root out Medicare fraud last month, and now has announced the technology and vendors that will make that happen. Verizon, alongside Northrop Grumman and WellPoint subsidiary National Government Services, has helped develop a technology for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that improves detection and prevention of fraud and waste. The new platform incorporates predictive modeling technology from Verizon to transform the way Medicare fraud is detected, and officials say it will provide CMS with a scalable and automated solution that scrutinizes incoming Medicare program claims, routing those that may be fraudulent to case managers for investigation.
The Food and Drug Administration's recent guidance on how it might regulate mobile health applications used by physicians and consumers will affect only a small portion of the apps on the market, the agency said. However, the FDA's expanded regulation of device-related software will affect device manufacturers and the growing number of firms marketing health apps for smartphones and tablets. "The majority of the folks who I've been dealing with do fall within the scope of that guidance document," said Bradley Thompson, a New York attorney specializing in medical device regulation.
Millions of people across the globe die each year from medical errors and infections linked to healthcare and going into hospital is far riskier than flying, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday. "If you were admitted to hospital tomorrow in any country... your chances of being subjected to an error in your care would be something like 1 in 10. Your chances of dying due to an error in healthcare would be 1 in 300," Liam Donaldson, the WHO's newly appointed envoy for patient safety, told a news briefing. This compared with a risk of dying in an air crash of about 1 in 10 million passengers, according to Donaldson, formerly England's chief medical officer. "It shows that healthcare generally worldwide still has a long way to go," he said. Hundreds of millions of people suffer infections linked to healthcare each year.
The JMH Health Plan, the insurance wing of the Jackson Health System, has become a huge money-loser that must be fixed quickly, board members were told Thursday. So far this year, the plan has lost $30.4 million -- almost half of the $71.7 million that Jackson Health System has lost for the entire fiscal year. "We have to fix this no matter what," CEO Carlos Migoya told the Financial Recovery Board. "Even if we decide we don't want to be in the health plan business, we need to fix it in order to sell it." Previous administrations had counted on the health plan as a major money-maker to compensate for all the uninsured patients. But with $337 million in system losses the past two years, deficits in the insurance plan seem an unconscionable drain, board members concluded. Chief Strategy Officer Donn Szaro said the plan's problems are a "microcosm" of Jackson's woes. The system has a hard time determining its costs in many areas, making it hard to know how much to charge for services.