A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds the public generally fearful that a revamped healthcare system would bring higher costs while worsening the quality of their care. A bare majority of Americans still believe government action is needed to control runaway healthcare costs and expand coverage to the roughly 46 million people without insurance. But after a year of national debate, there is minimal public enthusiasm for the kind of comprehensive changes in healthcare now under consideration, the poll found.
President Barack Obama pressed Senate Democrats to close ranks quickly behind a deal that has disappointed some liberals, saying lawmakers are "on the precipice of an achievement that has eluded Congresses and presidents for generations." Standing with senior Democrats in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Obama said there is "broad consensus" on the core of the bill. Some differences remain, but President Obama suggested it was time to compromise, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Federal agents announced they have broken up five separate rings that allegedly filed $61 million in false claims with Medicare, and charged 32 people in Miami, Florida; Detroit, Michigan; and Brooklyn, New York, with a variety of schemes to defraud the healthcare system for the elderly and disabled. The largest case, in Miami, involved a doctor and nurses who allegedly ordered home healthcare services that were not medically necessary, CNN reports.
Hackers may have had access to personal information for about 600 University of California-San Francisco patients as a result of an Internet "phishing" scam, campus officials said. The security breach occurred in September when a faculty physician in the UCSF School of Medicine provided a user name and password in response to a scam e-mail message. The e-mail had been sent by hackers and made to look as though it came from UCSF workers who are responsible for upgrading security on internal computer servers, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The patients have all been notified of the security breach.
Judith Persichilli has been tapped to lead Catholic Health East, a health system based in Newtown Square, PA. Persichilli told the Philadelphia Inquirer that there will be more focus on technology and electronic medical records. The system also will expand efforts to improve the health of populations of patients, to work jointly with physicians when contracting with insurers, and to provide care across the whole continuum from primary care through hospitalization. Catholic Health East includes 34 acute-care hospitals as well as nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and home health and hospice agencies.
Blue Shield of California has notified individual policyholders that their coverage could be immediately dropped if they miss a single payment. Blue Shield says in a letter to customers that they can reapply for insurance, but with potentially higher premiums and stricter conditions. This represents a significant change from Blue Shield's former practice of giving customers two special grace periods annually to make up for missed payments without any change to coverage or premiums, reports Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus.
Officials from the Cook County (IL) Health and Hospitals System and other agencies have begun offering outplacement services to the hundreds of workers facing layoffs in the coming month. In October, more than 600 vacant posts and 335 filled spots were eliminated from the healthcare system. The layoffs are expected to begin sometime in January. The services will include information about job training and benefits.
A for-profit healthcare company from Tennessee has agreed to purchase Ottumwa, IA's hospital. The sale of Ottumwa Regional Health Center would make it the only sizable Iowa hospital to be run as a for-profit business, the Des Moines Register reports. The Tennessee company, RegionalCare Hospital Partners, intends to make the 217-bed Ottumwa facility its first hospital. The company is led by industry veterans who used to run a large healthcare chain, and said they want to add more hospitals.
GlaxoSmithKline has become the latest big pharma company to disclose payments to healthcare providers, listing 3,700 U.S. doctors and others who received a total of $14.6 million in speaking and consulting fees during the second quarter. Glaxo limits payments to an individual physician to $150,000 a year; the average payment in the report was $3,909. In 2010, it plans to expand what it discloses, the Wall Street Journal Health Blog reports.
A Fulton County (GA) Superior Court judge said he will dismiss the lawsuit by patients trying to force Atlanta-based Grady Memorial Hospital to reopen its outpatient dialysis clinic, according to a lawyer in the case. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of about 50 patients who are needy illegal immigrants. The patients and advocates said the closing of the clinic violated their constitutional right to the healthcare service. The patients also said that the closure represented medical abandonment.
