A federal judge has given preliminary approval for UnitedHealth Group Inc. to pay $895 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over backdated stock options. The settlement also has the company's former chief executive William McGuire paying $30 million and another former executive, general counsel David Lubben, paying $500,000.
President-elect Barack Obama will face several obstacles in tackling healthcare reform, particularly amid a sinking economy. Sixty-four percent of voters expect him to "improve the healthcare system," a USA Today/Gallup survey taken right after the election found. But there are several factors for and against a makeover of the system.
Piedmont Healthcare is suspending its $194 million project to build a state-of-the-art hospital in Newnan, GA. Piedmont officials blamed the "current instability of the debt market" in its decision to pause the project for the next few months. "We had planned to go to the bond market to finance most of the project, and there's just not a market out there now," Piedmont spokeswoman Nina Montanaro said. Financing the hospital now "would cost us millions more," she said.
After years of lobbying, Pennsylvania nurses and other medical professionals will no longer be forced to routinely work overtime.
Under a new law, which goes into effect in July, healthcare facilities will be prohibited, with few exceptions, from forcing nurses and certain other healthcare staffers to work beyond their scheduled shifts. Supporters of the bill say it is aimed at improving patient safety by cutting down on the possibility of nurses and other healthcare workers becoming overtired and more prone to making mistakes.
Key players in the debate over how to provide healthcare coverage for the nation's 47 million uninsured say they view Massachusetts' 2006 law as a model for what Washington could do and how to get it done. Massachusetts achieved near-universal coverage by investing heavily in patching the holes in the existing system, where most people get coverage through work. The centrist approach rejects both the liberal vision of a Canadian-style Medicare-for-all system and the conservative preference to move to a deregulated market where people buy policies on their own with the help of tax credits.
The economic downturn is hitting hospitals to a degree not seen in past recessions, according to survey by the Wisconsin Hospital Association. The survey of about 85 hospitals for the first nine months of this year found that charity care increased 19.1%, bad debt increased 19.6%, and nearly one-third of the hospitals had trouble raising money. The survey was done in November and compared the first nine months of this year with the same period in 2007.
In this video from the Wall Street Journal, Steve Shihadeh of Microsoft Health Solutions discusses how the company is looking to build applications to improve healthcare.
The $8 million in new state money that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich allegedly tied to a $50,000 campaign contribution from a children's hospital executive would have provided medical treatment to the sickest and poorest children throughout the state. An affidavit by FBI agent Daniel W. Cain said that after the governor decided to approve the new $8 million in funding, he told an aide on Oct. 8 that he was considering reversing course because Children's Memorial chief executive Patrick M. Magoon hadn't contributed $50,000 to the governor's campaign fund.
Dennis Millirons, who guided Libertyville, IL-based Condell Medical Center in Libertyville through a challenging period in the hospital's 80-year history, is resigning effective Jan. 13. The news comes weeks after the hospital paid a huge healthcare fraud settlement and was purchased by Advocate Health Care. The problematic deals with physicians were largely negotiated before Millirons arrived at Condell and during a period of financial unrest for the hospital.
A physician is being sued for making a woman's labor pain worse after he berated her throughout the delivery at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center. He was filling in for another doctor and chastised her for "not calling ahead" and told her it was too late for pain medication, acccording to a civil suit filed in Cook County, IL, courts.
