Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is pressuring the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to account for its charitable-care practices as part of his ongoing crackdown on tax-exempt hospitals. Responding to pointed questions about everything from the hospital's relationships with insurance companies to bill-collection policies to fundraising activity, M.D. Anderson officials this week delivered four bound volumes of data to Grassley. The Iowa senator has been investigating tax-exempt organizations, including hospitals he says don't provide public benefits equal to the subsidies they receive.
Birmingham, AL-based Physicians Medical Center Carraway expects to get an immediate cash infusion from its landlord to allow it to make payroll and keep the century-old hospital open for the immediate future, hospital officials said. Physicians Carraway has run out of money, and its line of credit was frozen by GE Capital earlier. Board trustees turned to the hospital's other creditors for help to try to avoid filing for bankruptcy.
General Motors is ending health coverage for more than 100,000 salaried GM retirees and their dependents Jan. 1 to save the $3.3 billion it spent on retiree healthcare in 2007. Retirees will receive $300 a month in their pension checks to buy healthcare. They can begin enrolling in Medicare as early as October 15, a month earlier than Medicare's enrollment for everyone else.
Almost one-third of people under 65 in the Florida county of Miami-Dade and one-fourth in Broward County, FL, lacked health insurance in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. As have many other studies, the report found a wide disparity among racial-ethnic groups. Hispanics in Florida were far more likely to be uninsured, at 38.6%. Black non-Hispanics had a 26.7% rate, the highest rate for blacks found anywhere in the country.
A number of health reformers call for insurance tax credits that people could use to shop for individual health policies on the open market. Competition and freedom of choice would help the health system, the thinking goes. But findings from a survey of individual insurance shoppers show that 15% of people looking for insurance online were deemed "uninsurable" for standard coverage by most insurance carriers.
The New York Department of Health has cleared Stony Brook University Medical Center in cases involving four families whose children had been treated in the now closed pediatric cardiac surgery program. In 2006, weeks after the department closed the medical center's pediatric cardiac surgery program because it lacked a full-time surgeon, four families filed complaints with the Health Department. They had similar stories, saying their infants, born with heart defects, were treated for stomach problems instead of having cardiac surgery.