Sioux Falls, SD-based Sanford Health has announced that it will construct its first international children's clinic in the Central American nation of Belize. The clinic, expected to open in 2011, will be built on land donated by a hospital in Belize City. Sanford Health will collaborate with the Belize Healthcare Charitable Trust and Belize Natural Energy Trust on the facility.
For more than a decade, researchers have documented the inequities, shortcomings, waste, and dangers in uncoordinated medical services that consume nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy. Exorbitant medical bills thrust too many families into bankruptcy, hinder the global competitiveness of U.S. companies, and threaten the government's long-term solvency. But the consensus on the issue breaks down on the question of how best to create a coordinated, high-performing, evidence-based system that provides the right care at the right time to the right people, according to this article from the Washington Post.
As part of the larger effort to overhaul healthcare, lawmakers are trying to address the huge geographic variations in Medicare spending per beneficiary. Research suggests that the higher spending does not produce better results for patients but may be evidence of inefficiency. Members of Congress are seriously considering proposals to rein in the growth of health spending by taking tens of billions of dollars of Medicare money away from doctors and hospitals in high-cost areas and using it to help cover the uninsured or treat patients in lower-cost regions.
Two pressure points are emerging in Congress's rush to pass healthcare legislation: how to pay for the package and whether to create a new public health-insurance plan. Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said his office has given lawmakers a "tremendous quantity of numbers" as they weigh how much it will cost to extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans and how much revenue will be raised by proposed tax increases. The CBO's numbers are critical because they are the basis for determining a bill's price tag, and whether the plan won't increase the budget deficit.
Premiums for Washington state's Basic Health Plan will as much as double in January as part of a strategy to drive thousands of members off the cash-strapped state-subsidized insurance program. Officials announced that they will boost Basic Health's rates by an average of 70% as part of their effort to boot 30,000 to 40,000 working-class people off its rolls. Officials rejected four other potential options on how to shrink the 100,000-member pool, including a lottery and ejecting members based on how long they'd been on the program.
More than 800 employees at the Bayonne (NJ) Medical Center will be locked out at today when temporary workers are brought in to fill their positions, hospital officials said. The decision to lock out the workers represented by the Health Professional and Allied Employees came when union officials refused to withdraw notice of a strike, the officials said. The union's contract at the hospital officially expired May 31.