Last year, the people crafting new conflict-of-interest rules for the University of Minnesota Medical School touted them as some of the toughest in the nation. The 13-page draft banned gifts to faculty, researchers, and students from drug and medical device companies. It barred the companies from funding continuing education, and established strict guidelines for reporting industry relationships, including disclosure to patients and the public.
But six months later, a slimmed-down, two-page version bearing a few notable changes is winding its way through the university's bureaucracy toward approval by the Board of Regents.
The California Department of Public Health said that 10 hospitals around the state have been given penalties for putting patients at risk as a result of not being in compliance with licensing requirements. The penalty is relatively small, $25,000, and the hospitals have 10 days during which they can appeal the finding. The state will also accept a payment schedule for the penalties.
Oklamhoma lawmakers showed overwhelming support for House Speaker Chris Benge's plan to provide state residents with quality healthcare through affordable private health insurance policies and reduce the number of uninsured. House members voted 99-0 for the measure that would primarily strengthen and promote the state's Insure Oklahoma program, a public-private partnership first proposed by Gov. Brad Henry in 2004.
Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has promised to introduce comprehensive healthcare legislation in June, certainly before the chamber's August recess. Baucus said that he planned to introduce a bipartisan bill with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R., Iowa) that would adopt a mix of public and private solutions and that he hoped 70 senators would approve it.
Health insurers that offer a private alternative to traditional Medicare have been among the sectors most affected as Wall Street reacts to the Obama administration's plans to make sharp cuts in their payments and open the program to competitive bidding. Other sectors, such as hospitals, also expect cuts as the new administration trims certain costs to expand healthcare coverage for the uninsured, analysts said. The expected cuts in budgets for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid could lead more doctors and hospitals to stop treating patients whose care is paid for by the government.
The LA Times reported yesterday that U.S. hospitals are bleeding red ink. Half of them are running losses, forcing them to cut services and staff. For sure this is not just a problem for U.S. hospitals.
The global recession—at what point can we start calling it a depression?—has hammered every organization's investments, and elective procedures aren't just down in Florida; private hospitals around the globe are performing fewer elective surgeries.
Even as U.S. hospitals try to stop the bleeding, there's a sense that things are going to get worse before they improve. At the same time, private global hospitals and medical travel facilitators are sticking to a game plan they drew up before any of us saw that the economic crisis was coming.
Last week, I told you about Companion Global expanding its network into Mexico. This week, a new medical travel company called Satori World Medical announced a deal with a California-based employee benefits firm. The agreement lets McGregor & Associates, a benefits consulting firm that specializes in public sector employers, offer its clients Satori's global network of providers for select elective procedures.
I just received a written statement about the deal from Satori last night, but the prepared quote attributed to George McGregor, president of McGregor & Associates, hit on some of the major themes employer groups have been complaining about even before the economy tanked: "The costs of healthcare in the U.S. are higher than in any other country in the world, placing an enormous burden on today's U.S. companies that fund their employees' healthcare, in addition to the employees themselves who have become responsible for more and more of their own medical expenses."
Nowadays, elective procedures are going to be a hard sell for just about every healthcare organization, and I'm hardly convinced that for U.S.-based healthcare executives trying to keep hospital margins afloat that the medical travel threat is the top concern right now. But considering the financial outlook of the healthcare system and the fact that global competitors are focusing on traditionally high-dollar elective procedures, it may not take millions of patients to hurt U.S. healthcare's bottom line.
As Mike Taylor, a principal at Towers Perrin in Boston, told me when I was working on a recent cover story on medical travel, community hospital administrators would get nervous if global competitors were someday able to siphon 10% of select elective surgeries. "Those are the procedures that make the difference as to whether the hospital is in the red or in the black," he said.
Indeed, and more and more hospitals are not able to get the electives needed to make up the difference.
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