Mayo Clinic president and CEO Denis Cortese, MD, has announced that he will retire in November. James Barksdale, chair of the Mayo Clinic Board of Trustees, praised the service Cortese has offered Mayo for 33 years. Cortese has become an advocate for reforming the nation's healthcare system, and the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center was formed under his watch.
Health-insurance stocks plunged Thursday, led by a 19% drop in Humana Inc. shares, after the Obama administration outlined plans to finance a big chunk of its health-reform agenda with $175 billion in cuts to private Medicare plans. Shares in Humana, which has more than 1.4 million Medicare Advantage members, took the biggest plunge, falling $5.72 to $23.64 in trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
The ideas in President Barack Obama's budget are a mixed bag for insurers, doctors, and hospitals. Investors reacted with alarm, sending insurance stocks down sharply. But insurers, striving to be seen as progressive, welcomed Obama's broad goals, such as stemming the relentless increase in costs throughout the healthcare system.
The Obama administration will move to rescind a controversial rule that allows healthcare workers to deny abortion counseling or other family-planning services if doing so would violate their moral beliefs, according to administration officials. The rollback of the "conscience rule" comes just two months after the Bush administration announced it last year. The action seems certain to stoke ideological battles between supporters and opponents of abortion rights over the responsibilities of doctors, nurses, and other medical workers to their patients.
Thousands of low-income Massachusetts residents may be getting a new health insurance option under a proposed venture by the Caritas Christi Health Care network and St. Louis-based Centene Corp. Massachusetts regulators unveiled the proposal as they reviewed bids to provide state-subsidized health insurance to 163,600 adults in the Commonwealth Care program.
A recent debate in healthcare reform has centered on the $1.1 billion set aside in the economic stimulus bill to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for the same illness. Supporters believe that such "comparative effectiveness" research will help to identify ineffective therapy, improve quality of care and ultimately decrease the time, effort, and money spent on treatments that don't work well. But critics say that such research could ultimately lead to a one-treatment-fits-all approach and that it would allow the government to dictate "appropriate" decisions in the doctor-patient relationship.