A report from the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of major companies, says America's healthcare system has become a liability in a global economy. The Business Roundtable report says Americans in 2006 spent $1,928 per capita on healthcare, at least two-and-a-half times more per person than any other advanced country.
Sutter Health will return management of Marin General Hospital, Marin County, CA's largest hospital, to the district board one minute before midnight on June 29, 2010. The transfer is part of a 2006 court-approved agreement that resolves a feud between Sutter Health and publicly elected board members of the Marin Healthcare District. The district is resuming control of the hospital, which has been leased to Sutter since 1996.
Tenet Healthcare Corp. has agreed to pay $85 million to settle claims that nurses and other staff in California were denied extra overtime pay for working 12-hour shifts. Tenet will pay about 23,000 current and former hospital employees under the settlement.
San Francisco's Public Health Department will increasingly move toward providing universal primary care and away from funding supplementary programs for drug users, the mentally ill and others, the city's public health chief said. The news comes as activists and healthcare providers alike are fighting expected cuts to the Health Department budget.
Dozens of doctors from Contra Costa County, CA's public hospital rallied in Martinez to protest a cost-cutting plan that would slash medical services for 5,500 undocumented immigrants. Under the plan, adult patients seeking medical help under the county's low-income Basic Health Care Program would have to provide proof of legal immigration status. County health officials believe their proposal, could save the county's overtaxed medical system $6 million a year.
More than 190 doctors at the University of Chicago Medical Center have signed a letter to trustees protesting plans to reduce the number of beds available to emergency patients as "unnecessarily risky" and a threat to patient safety. The controversy over the hospital's unusual plan is being closely watched by emergency physicians across the U.S. as hospitals wrestle with rising costs and sometimes inadequate reimbursements from federal and state programs.
Mason City-based Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa says it will eliminate 59 jobs as it restructures its home healthcare service and hospice program. It also is closing a clinic in Rockwell. Officials cite several factors for the cuts, including unfavorable investment returns, rising costs of uncompensated care, and expected decreases in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements.
Tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents who receive state-subsidized healthcare will avoid any increase in monthly premium costs this year, and some may even pay less, under a plan to be voted on by state regulators. Secretary of Administration and Finance Leslie Kirwan said that her staff will recommend that the Connector Authority board approve the no-increase measure because of the "severe economic environment."
Six months after the first CVS MinuteClinics opened in Massachusetts, thousands of residents have visited the in-store clinics for treatment. With MinuteClinics opening at a rate of more than two a month in Massachusetts, company executives said they have taken off there faster than in the 24 other states where the company owns clinics. Nurse practitioners at the 16 Massachusetts clinics open so far have treated more than 10,000 patients with acute problems and given about 10,000 flu shots, the executives said. One major factor in the clinics' success is that the state's three largest insurers cover the visits without a physician's referral, they added.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine says 19% of general internists were hospitalists in 2006, up from 6% in 1995. The increased role of hospitalists has come in part because managed care's declining payments to primary-care doctors forced them to see more patients in the office, to the detriment of their hospital rounds, says an editorial that accompanies the study. But while hospitalists have accommodated primary-care doctors, their role has also meant primary-care docs miss out on satisfying and important care, the editorial states.
