Florida Lawmakers and Gov. Charlie Crist are trying to find a way to get coverage for more of the nearly 4 million Floridians without health insurance. The Florida House has debated a wide-ranging proposal that tries to encourage the creation of cheap health insurance plans in several ways. One proposal to reduce costs is a plan that would free insurance companies from having to cover many of the types of care they normally must cover under the law.
People whose policies were canceled by California health insurers will have a chance to win back their coverage and be reimbursed for outstanding medical bills. The state's Department of Managed Health Care will reopen policies dropped over the last four years by the state's five major insurers and submit them for reconsideration to an independent arbiter. Those determined to have been wrongly canceled would be reinstated, and the insurers would be responsible for medical bills incurred while patients were without coverage, said department representatives.
As Georgia's Trauma Care Network Commission prepares to divvy up $58 million in aid, trauma hospitals in the state want the commission to make sure it's not just about Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital. The plight of financially-strapped Grady has highlighted the desperate condition of trauma care in Georgia: The state has 15 hospitals prepared to handle the most severe injuries. But as the Trauma Care Network Commission prepares to divide the one-time infusion of cash, providers have made it clear that they are suffering as well, and they want their fair share.
Talks have broken down between two Tenet Healthcare Corp. hospitals in the Philadelphia area and Independence Blue Cross as the expiration date of their contract approaches. Both sides have notified Blue Cross subscribers that they may not be covered for treatment by the Tenet hospitals or some of their doctors after April 30. Hahnemann University Hospital and St. Christopher's Hospital for Children say Blue Cross wants to pay them significantly less than it pays comparable hospitals. Experts say the battle reveals much about the balance of power between the Philadelphia region's hospitals and its dominant private health insurer.
Lawmakers in the Massachusetts Senate are backing a bill to rein in healthcare costs to help pay for the state's universal healthcare law. Among other provisions, the bill would require the state to adopt a statewide electronic medical record system and set up uniform billing among healthcare providers and insurance companies.
The reforms are expected to save the state hundreds of millions of dollars.
Health insurer Cigna Corp. has announced that as of Oct. 1, it will no longer reimburse hospitals for patient expenses resulting from medical mistakes. The new policy is consistent with and based on a similar policy outlined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said CIGNA representatives.
Massachusetts will receive $4.6 million from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services as part of a federal program to control government healthcare costs by reducing unnecessary emergency room visits. The grant is part of a total $50 million in grants to 20 states. The goal is to help state Medicaid programs divert patients away from ERs and into other healthcare centers if they don't have medical problems requiring emergency treatment.
The federal government is not doing enough to protect patients from hospital infections, and as a result is endangering tens of thousands of lives and costing billions of dollars, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Although private groups demand steps such as requiring doctors and nurses to wash their hands, the government has not established sufficient standards for hospitals to follow or prodded hospitals to follow those standards to reduce infections, the GAO added in the report. The GAO report urged the government to prioritize its standards and improve data collection.
George Zara, chief executive of Denver's Saint Anthony Hospitals, has been tapped to head the financially-ailing South Carolina-based Sisters of Charity Providence Hospital. Experts say Zara will have a full plate once he arrives at Providence. The system continues operating in a tough economic environment caused by increased cost of equipment as the number of uninsured patients rises and the payments made by government and private insurers decrease. In addition, an $82 million plan to increase the number of beds and increase emergency, intensive care and MRI services at Providence's Northeast Richland campus is being contested by Lexington Medical Center.
As federal funding continues to decline, community health centers throughout Florida have been hit with more uninsured patients in the past couple of years. The Florida Association of Community Health Centers' 221 facilities in the state treated a total of more than 700,000 patients who were on Medicaid or uninsured in 2007. That was nearly 60,000 more patients than 2006, and 40,000 of those were uninsured. Representatives from the Association expect the number of people who need services to increase as the county population swells and the economy tightens.