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.
Black, Latino, and Asian lawmakers want President Barack Obama to focus more on racial disparities reported in medical treatment as the White House works toward overhauling the nation's healthcare system.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus sent Obama a letter calling for more attention to minority health problems. They are expected to join lawmakers from Hispanic and Asian caucuses at a news conference on Capitol Hill to call attention to the issue.
Increasingly, hospitals are being evaluated and compared on measures of patient and family satisfaction, and the intensive care unit (ICU) is no exception, says Sg2 analyst Joan Moss, RN, MSN. In the ICU, the family is the focus of efforts to improve satisfaction, she says, and family satisfaction has been shown to drive market share growth and return business across service lines.
The Golden Gate Restaurant Association filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to make the final decision on whether San Francisco's mandate that employers pay for healthcare coverage is legal. The city's universal healthcare program, dubbed Healthy San Francisco, began two years ago and requires that employers with at least 20 employees provide health insurance, set up healthcare spending accounts, or pay into the city's fund. Kevin Westlye, director of the restaurant association, said the fees are incredibly burdensome on restaurant owners.