Several Orlando-area companies are opening on-site health clinics or highlighting services at existing facilities, hoping to reduce their health-insurance costs by emphasizing preventive care. The companies expect the relatively small expenditures needed to start a clinic and keep it operating to result in long-term savings.
Richard Hynes, MD, the chief medical officer at Holmes Regional Medical Center, is suing the Melbourne, FL-based hospital's board of directors for violating hospital bylaws and potentially compromising patient care. On behalf of the hospital's medical staff, Hynes alleges that the board violated its own bylaws, which form a contract under Florida law between the hospital and doctors and allied health professionals who work at the hospital. "This is all about ensuring quality of patient care," said Richard Levenstein, the attorney for Hynes, the president of the medical staff, and the hospital's estimated 584 physicians.
A new study has found that 44% of qualified applicants to Florida nursing schools were turned away in the 2007-2008 academic year. The Florida Center for Nursing reports that the 12,563 qualified applicants who were rejected by Florida nursing schools nearly equals the state's shortage of nursing positions the nonprofit group estimates for 2009. Florida nursing schools enrolled 14,644 new students in the last academic year.
New research by a UT Southwestern Medical Center physician calls into question whether health insurers are adequately containing costs. Ethan Halm, MD, chief of internal medicine at UT Southwestern, found that private managed-care plans for Medicare do no better job of steering patients away from unnecessary surgeries than the traditional fee-for-service system, where the patient goes to any provider and the doctor or hospital bills Medicare directly.
Although two proposals to raise money for trauma care have been introduced in the Georgia House, key leaders in the Senate say there isn't enough money available to provide a permanent fix to the state's weak trauma care network.
Although a proposed merger between the two Pennsylvania insurers has been called off, Highmark, Inc. and Independence Blue Cross will look for ways, outside of a merged structure, to capitalize on the knowledge they gained of each others' businesses as they planned for integration.
It will get vastly cheaper for most people to keep health insurance after losing a job if the government's stimulus plan becomes law. But the billions to be poured into healthcare from the economic stimulus package will do little, if anything, about the chronic conditions behind the nation's large ranks of uninsured. Instead the plan is a temporary lifeline, hasty measures for nearly desperate times, according to this article from the Associated Press.
More than a dozen Connecticut lawmakers have warned that thousands of vulnerable residents in the HUSKY health insurance program could struggle to get healthcare because of what they called premature changes to HUSKY that took effect Feb. 1. The changes are the result of the state ending its relationship with Anthem BlueCare, a longtime HUSKY insurance carrier that did not bid on new HUSKY contracts last year. The state is also ending its traditional Medicaid program, and people in both plans must now switch carriers.
A man who raped women as an on-duty Los Angeles police officer was hired by Los Angeles County as an X-ray technologist after he got out of prison, even though the job would leave him working alone and unsupervised with female patients. The man disclosed his criminal history in his county job application, and both the head of hospital human resources and a chief aide then signed papers that said there was no reason his convictions for rape should prevent him from doing the job, according to newly obtained records and interviews.
At a time when workers nationwide stand to make big gains under the Obama administration, the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers is seeking alliances with rivals of the powerful SEIU. The leaders of the respective unions are preparing for what some say could become a war of attrition for the right to represent tens of thousands of healthcare workers—and perhaps a boon for employers eager to see a sector of organized labor divided.
