WellPoint Inc., which operates in Illinois as UniCare, said it will exit Illinois and Texas, where it has about 400,000 members, in an effort to focus on its other U.S. operations. WellPoint said the subsidiary is profitable, but "there are competitive pressures in Illinois and Texas that have made it increasingly difficult for UniCare to offer quality products that are competitively priced." WellPoint said its Illinois UniCare customers would be guaranteed coverage if they transition to Health Care Service Corp., parent of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois.
Unionized nurses in Massachusetts are moving toward affiliating with their counterparts in California and more than 20 other states to create the largest nurses union in U.S. history. The move could give the state's nurses more bargaining power with hospitals and aid organizing efforts at nonunion healthcare providers such as Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. But it is being opposed by some nurses at Brigham and Women's Hospital and elsewhere who do not want to pay the added dues needed to finance the organization, the Boston Globe reports.
Employers are blasting the Senate's plan to create a new public health-insurance program, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Business Roundtable, an association of company executives, is calling and visiting lawmakers to persuade them not to include the public plan in the legislation. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce began airing cable-television advertisements in seven states arguing that the public option will lead to higher taxes and increase the national debt.
In a bid to cut healthcare costs, International Business Machines Corp. plans to stop requiring $20 co-payments by employees when they visit primary-care physicians. The company said it believed the move would save costs by encouraging people to go to primary-care doctors faster, in order to get earlier diagnoses that could save on expensive visits to specialists and emergency rooms. One of the nation's largest employers with 115,000 U.S. workers, IBM spends about $1.3 billion a year on U.S. healthcare.
As U.S. lawmakers engage in a debate over healthcare reform, Chinese authorities are also attempting to fix their system. Over the past five years, the government has tried to provide coverage to more of its 1.4 billion people. But even people covered by a minimal health insurance program are often left with big hospital bills and must pay for most outpatient services and medication. In addition, more than 300 million people do not have any health insurance. The gap in the quality of care has been steadily growing, too, the Washington Post reports.
A marketing campaign for Georgia-based North Fulton Regional called "We Specialize in You" included several dozen photos of medical staff being posted at the North Point Mall for all the mall visitors to see. The second phase was to replace those photos with more pictures, but this time of patients.