GM's new cost-cutting labor agreement with the United Auto Workers will go to a union vote. The UAW, in documents prepared for its members, said some of the changes in the retiree healthcare trust and other benefits were insisted upon by the federal government as conditions for additional support for GM. Under the agreement, the UAW-aligned healthcare trust—the Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association—will receive half of the $20 billion debt GM owes the fund in stock and new debt, instead of cash.
As federal prosecutors gear up to tackle more Medicare fraud as part of a nationwide initiative, the U.S. attorney in Tennessee has been tackling a few Medicare cases of his own. U.S. Attorney Edward Yarbrough's office filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Middle Tennessee, alleging wrongdoing by a Georgia diagnostic imaging company with three clinics. The lawsuit was the second local Medicare fraud case filed in a matter of days by federal prosecutors in Tennessee.
Offering what its creators believe could be a model for affordable health insurance nationwide, a unique public-private partnership is aimed at helping the estimated 600,000 uninsured in Miami-Dade County (FL). Called Miami-Dade Blue, the county worked with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida to develop a plan that would cost a healthy 35-year-old male about $100 a month.
Mednax, a physician services company based in Sunrise, FL, announced it has acquired Regional Obstetric Consultants, a Jacksonville, FL-based maternal-fetal medicine group. Mednax paid cash for the practice, which is expected to immediately add to earnings. No additional terms were disclosed.
Eneida O. Roldan, MD, has been named the new president and chief executive officer of the Miami-based Jackson Health System. Roldan has served as interim president of the healthcare network—which includes Jackson Memorial Hospital, Holtz Children's Hospital, 17 school-based programs and three mobile vans—since former president Marvin O'Quinn left in 2008. She is the first woman and first Hispanic person to have the position.
About 1 million adult residents of California travel to Mexico for medical care each year, according to UCLA researchers.
About half of those who travel to Mexico for healthcare services are Mexican immigrants. Those who have been in the United States for at least 15 years are more likely to head south for health-related reasons than are people who have been here fewer than 15 years, the study found.
Lord Darzi of Denham, a surgeon and top official in Britain's Department of Health, is angry over an ad campaign produced by Conservatives for Patients' Rights, a U.S. group opposed to some of President Obama's health-reform proposals. The TV and Internet campaign focuses in particular on Britain's National Health Service, featuring British patients and doctors complaining that they can't get access to the medicines and diagnostic tests they need. In response, Darzi told the Wall Street Journal Health Blog that the NHS provides a high standard of care to all Britons despite spending less per capita than is spent in the U.S.
A bipartisan group of Congressmen wants President Barack Obama to withdraw the Oct. 1 phase out of indirect medical education reimbursement for teaching hospitals under the capital prospective payment system.
"Eliminating the IME adjustment to the capital PPS would result in nearly $375 million in aggregate annual losses and threatens the financial viability of teaching hospitals, which serve a high volume of Medicare beneficiaries and provide critical services unavailable elsewhere in communities across the country," states the May 22 letter. It was signed by more than 200 Democratic and Republican representatives.
"Given that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found that major teaching hospitals in 2007 faced very low overall Medicare margins of 1.1%, and that other teaching hospitals had even lower margins of negative 6.4%, it is clear that further unwarranted reductions in payments to these hospitals would have devastating consequences on the patients and communities they serve," the letter states.
CMS last year promulgated a rule that permanently phased out over fiscal years 2009 and 2010 the IME adjustment paid to teaching hospitals for their capital expenditures. The policy was to be fully phased in on Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year.
However, Congress eliminated the first year of the cuts in the stimulus act. Now, the Congressmen want Obama to withdraw the remaining portion of the policy in this year's rule for the inpatient prospective payment system.
The letter notes that while the inpatient PPS is the only payment system in Medicare that does not provide a single payment for total cost, hospitals have used these payments as if they were a single, combined payment ever since capital cost-based reimbursement ended. "As such, hospitals have appropriately made decisions to efficiently deploy their financial resources to meet their most urgent needs, as is the intent of the PPS," the letter states.
The Congressmen charge that CMS based its decision to eliminate capital IME payments on a capital margin analysis, and ignored the capital expenditure cycle by which hospitals plan and make capital investments.
"CMS should instead have examined Medicare margins across both capital and operating payment systems," the letter states.
The letter notes that teaching hospitals have higher capital costs because of the need for classroom space, extra training equipment for medical residents, as well as advanced environmental electrical, heating, and cooling systems to support the technology.
"As in the operating PPS, the capital IME adjustment recognizes that teaching hospitals must meet the demand of treating sicker patients, as well as meet the financial demands of operating emergency and trauma care, providing highly specialized services, and treating uninsured patients," the letter states.
A report from Frost and Sullivan shows that advances in the Malaysian healthcare system is leading to rapid growth in the imaging industry in the region. The study covers varying levels of technology adoption, future trends, and industry challenges in the computed radiography, digital radiography, and computer aided diagnosis markets.
For more than a decade, the prevailing view of innovation has been that it bubbled up from the bottom, from upstarts and insurgents, according to this article in the New York Times. Big companies didn't innovate, and venture-backed start-up companies were cast as the nimble winners and large corporations as the sluggish losers. But a shift in thinking is under way, according to the article.
