The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a probe into whether Hospital Corporation of America violated securities law by manipulating its books and records, according to documents and people familiar with the investigation. The investigation has been focusing in part on HCA's London subsidiary and whether the company fabricated tens of thousands of payments for phantom nursing shifts. HCA runs more than 160 facilities across the United States and in London.
Some influential centrist Democrats in the Senate are warming to a compromise that envisions health insurance plans run by state governments. A new proposal by Sen. Tom Carper would spell out how to boost competition in the private insurance market by enacting government-run plans at the state level. States could act alone or in concert with others to gain more leverage in the marketplace, and would be bound by the same rules established for private companies using the national insurance exchange envisioned by the Senate Finance bill. Another option would entail states opening their workers' employee-benefit plans to the general public, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Taken together, the views of four senators—Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon—represent the spectrum of concerns Democrats will face in trying to assemble the 60 votes they need to get a bill through the full Senate using regular procedure. Satisfying each of them, without alienating the others, is the challenge facing Democratic leaders, reports the New York Times.
As children received swine flu vaccine for the first time, federal health officials attacked popular myths about the pandemic and the vaccine designed to stop it. Thomas R. Frieden, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a news conference that the most common misperceptions are that this flu should ever be called a "mild disease," that the vaccine is untested and that it has arrived too late. Flu is widespread across the country and some hospitals are getting so many emergency room visits that they have set up triage tents, but Frieden said no intensive care units have had more patients than ventilators—something that did happen in one Canadian province last spring.
Fearing for his life, Anthem Blue Cross of California client Ephram Nehme paid for his own surgery in Indiana, where wait times for organ transplants are far shorter than in California. But Anthem Blue Cross said it would not pay for a transplant in Indiana. Nehme, a Lebanese immigrant, could afford the surgery himself and went to Indiana for the liver transplant. But he remains angry with Anthem and sued the company, accusing it of putting its bottom line ahead of his medical needs.
Instead of pens, scribes at the University of Virginia Medical Center use laptops as they trail doctors from bed to bed, taking detailed notes that will form part of each patient's electronic medical record. Experts say the scribes' role illustrates hospitals' often bumpy transition from clipboards and closets of paper charts to digital records.