A new emergency care center would replace the shuttered St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan in Greenwich Village under a deal announced on Thursday involving the hospital, its creditors, a developer and a hospital chain that would run the center. The agreement revives an earlier plan by the Rudin development family to buy the St. Vincent's properties on West 11th and 12th Streets and replace some of its buildings with town houses and apartments. The emergency care center would be opposite the residences, in the landmark O'Toole building on Seventh Avenue. Under the plan, it would provide 24-hour emergency care and ambulatory surgery, but not the comprehensive services of a full-fledged hospital. It is to be run by the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System and will be called the North Shore-LIJ Center for Comprehensive Care.
Some regions of the country that have been lambasted for high levels of Medicare spending actually are below the national average once the severity of patient sickness and special local expenses are taken into account, according to data from a new government analysis. Manhattan, Contra Costa County, CA, and Newark, NJ — areas suspected as places where doctors and hospitals may be performing too many procedures — actually have Medicare spending below the national average, given their patients' medical needs, according to the new calculations from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS. In CMS's analysis, 27 of the country's 306 hospital markets switched from higher than average to lower than average spenders after patient health and geographic cost factors were considered. Conversely, 60 regions that appeared to be low spenders in raw dollars actually were above the national average once the adjustments were made, the data show. Those areas include Ocala, FL, Mobile, AL, Tulsa, OK, and Wichita, KS.— nearly one out of every five regions.
File this under unintended consequences. If House Republicans get their way and prevent President Obama from using any discretionary appropriations to implement "Obamacare," it would cripple existing Medicare programs, many of which are operated under methodologies enacted in the healthcare law. In response to a letter from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius lists the ways the House spending bill would hamper existing entitlements. "If H.R. 1 were enacted, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would not be able to use CR funds to administer payments based on any rate calculated on the basis of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act -- which is to say virtually all rates," she writes. Among many other things, the law rescinded the old methodology by which the government paid Medicare Advantage providers and replaced it with a new one. The House spending bill would prohibit HHS from making payments under the new regime. And with the old regime eliminated, the department would have no legal authority to cover those services, according to Sebelius.
A federal panel will meet on Thursday to evaluate growing concerns about whether anesthesia in young children, used in millions of surgical procedures, can in some cases lead to cognitive problems or learning disabilities. The meeting was prompted by a growing body of research, so far primarily in animals, that suggests a correlation between anesthesia exposure and brain cell death or learning problems, said Dr. Bob Rappaport, the Food and Drug Administration's director of the division of anesthesia and analgesia products, who wrote about the issue in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine. The F.D.A. advisory panel will evaluate the research, suggest further studies and discuss whether parents whose children are facing surgery should be informed of possible cognitive or behavioral risks.
One of Miami-Dade's top financial minds is warning that the Boston healthcare company that has expressed interest in buying Jackson Health System may be offering to take over the public hospitals without paying the county anything. In its letters to Miami-Dade leaders, Steward Health Care Systems of Boston has said the deal would yield an investment by the company of "over $1 billion directly to the communities of Miami-Dade County." But Leo Guzman, head of Coral Gables-based Guzman & Co., points out that "nowhere in the 'proposal' does it spell out that Steward intends to pay for these assets." Guzman & Co. specializes in institutional brokerage and investment banking and is a member of the New York Stock Exchange. Steward spokesman Bruce Rubin characterized the talks differently: "Steward's letter of interest proposed, subject to due diligence, putting a total of $1.1 billion into the hospital, which is losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year and is a growing burden on the residents and taxpayers of Miami-Dade County." Specifically, Steward's letters says it might "absorb" Jackson's debt — about $500 million — and invest $600 million in capital improvements.
The price of preventing preterm labor is about to go through the roof. A drug for high-risk pregnant women has cost about $10 to $20 per injection. Next week, the price shoots up to $1,500 a dose, meaning the total cost during a pregnancy could be as much as $30,000. That's because the drug, a form of progesterone given as a weekly shot, has been made cheaply for years, mixed in special pharmacies that custom-compound treatments that are not federally approved. But recently, KV Pharmaceutical of suburban St.Louis won government approval to exclusively sell the drug, known as Makena. The March of Dimes and many obstetricians supported that because it means quality will be more consistent and it will be easier to get. None of them anticipated the dramatic price hike, though -- especially since most of the cost for development and research was shouldered by others in the past.