Hospitals and insurance companies are pushing back against changes to the latest Senate healthcare bill that ease the penalties for Americans who don't carry health insurance. Hospitals say the changes leave too few people covered under the bill—a shortfall that could undermine a cost-cutting pledge by the industry. Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, said the deal was based on lawmakers passing a bill that would leave 94% to 95% of Americans with health insurance.
Every proposal now before Congress to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system includes creation of an insurance "exchange" marketplace. In theory, the exchange would fix a fundamental flaw in the present system by giving small businesses and individuals a broad choice of insurance policies at competitive prices. But policy experts say few lawmakers have yet paid enough attention to what that new marketplace should look like, and whether it would actually work as promised, reports the New York Times.
The U.S. Supreme Court delayed action on employer fees in San Francisco's healthcare program and instead sought advice from the Obama administration. The Bush administration had urged two federal courts to overturn the city law, which requires companies with more than 20 employees to provide health insurance benefits or pay fees that cover the employees' healthcare at city hospitals and clinics. In February, President Obama generally praised San Francisco's program, which the city calls Healthy San Francisco, in a White House speech before an audience of mayors.
The first doses of swine flu vaccine arrived October 5, as more than half the United States reported widespread flu cases. "The level of activity we're seeing for this time of year is really unusual," said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We just really don't see the level of activity we're seeing." According to the CDC's latest report, which tracked influenza cases through the week of Sept. 26, 27 states across the nation report widespread cases, and 99% of flu cases being reported were H1N1-related.
Days after Atlanta-based Grady Memorial Hospital closed its outpatient dialysis clinic, some patients are running into snags getting alternative care. Dorothy Leone-Glasser, an activist with Grady Advocates for Responsible Care, said she has heard from about half a dozen patients who were told they could not get dialysis treatment at Fresenius Medical Care because their names were not included on a list from Grady, they had not been screened by a physician, or that they didn't have payment vouchers for service. Fresenius has a contract with GMHC to provide dialysis care for three months.
Los Angeles County officials are questioning the cost-effectiveness of rules aimed at screening those trying to get public health services. Since July 2008, when Los Angeles County began implementing tougher federal verification rules, health workers have gone back to check the documents of more than 100,000 recipients of Medi-Cal, the public healthcare program for low-income residents.
The county has received nearly $28 million in state and federal funds to cover the cost of the program and posted 81 people in 27 social service department offices to check documents, officials said. So far, they have not found one illegal immigrant who posed as a legal resident to get benefits, according to Deborah Walker, the county's Medi-Cal program director.
A start-up company led by Adam Bosworth, former head of the Google Health team, plans to become the newest entrant to the online consumer health business. While the Web provides a great deal of generalized health information, health experts say the ideal would be to combine personal data with health information to deliver tailored health plans for individuals. That is what Bosworth and his San Francisco-based company, Keas Inc., will try to do. Health technology experts say Keas is at the forefront of the effort to combine advanced Web and database technologies so it can personalize health education.
Bethesda, MD-based Coventry Health Care announced that it has agreed to acquire health plan Preferred Health Systems of Wichita, a move that would boost the managed-care provider's presence in the Midwest.
Under the deal, Coventry would add Preferred Health's roughly 100,000 members to its rolls, giving it more than 1 million members in six Midwestern states, Coventry chief executive Allen F. Wise said in a statement.
Due to an obscure change in Medicare rules that occurred nearly a decade ago, "provider-based billing" allows hospitals that own physician practices and outpatient clinics that meet certain federal requirements to bill separately for the facility as well as for physician services. Consumer advocates across the country say patients increasingly are being charged the fees, and a consultant has estimated that the fees could generate an additional $30,000 annually per physician for hospitals.
When it comes to "preventable deaths," the United States trails other industrialized nations and has been falling further behind over the past decade. Although the United States now spends $2.4 trillion a year on medical care, the nation ranks near the bottom on premature deaths caused by illnesses such as diabetes, epilepsy, stroke, influenza, ulcers, and pneumonia, according to research by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund.
