The CBO estimates that most of the savings would come from reduced federal subsidies for healthcare and health insurance.
A U.S. Senate bill aimed at protecting patients from surprise medical bills could also save the federal government about $7.5 billion over the next decade, according to estimates released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office.
CBO estimates that under the sweeping Lower Healthcare Cost Act of 2019 the federal government would have to spend about $18.6 billion through 2029, primarily for additional funding for community health centers and other federal programs.
However, that outlay would be more than offset by about $26.2 billion in savings generated by reduced federal subsidies for healthcare and health insurance, CBO says.The bill cleared the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in late June on a bipartisan vote, and bill sponsor Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, hopes to have it passed on the Senate floor and signed by President Donald Trump by the end of July.
Last week, the House Health Subcommittee passed its own bipartisan package of healthcare reform measures, including a bill dealing with surprise medical bills.
In addition to addressing surprise medical bills, some of the Lower Healthcare Cost Act's 55 proposalswould also: allow cheaper generic or biosimilar drugs to enter the market earlier; impose new rules on contracts between insurers, providers, and pharmacy benefits managers; extend funding for community health centers and other federal healthcare programs; improve consumer access to healthcare cost and quality information; and prohibit some medical billing practices.
The CBO provided some caveats with their estimates, noting that it would be difficult to gauge the effect of provider and payer responses to the bill's provisions, or how well federal and state agencies would be able to implement the law.
The levy caps the amount of untaxed health benefits employers can provide to their workers with the goal of slowing healthcare spending.
One-in-five employer-sponsored high-cost health plans could be slapped with the Affordable Care Act's "Cadillac Tax" when it takes effect in 2022, according to a new analysis.
The Kaiser Family Foundation study found an even larger share – 31% of health plans – could be affected when workers’ contributions to flexible spending accounts are accounted for.
The Cadillac Tax was supposed to take effect in 2018, but Congress delayed the measure until 2022. Lawmakers are considering a bill that would repeal the tax, which caps the amount of untaxed health benefits employers can provide to their workers with the goal of slowing healthcare spending.
About 156 million people get their health insurance coverage through an employer, making it the largest source of coverage in the United States.
The tax slaps a 40% levy of workers' health benefits above a threshold, adjusted annually for inflation. In 2022, the thresholds are estimated to reach $11,200 for single coverage and $30,100 for family coverage, KFF said.
The KFF analysis uses its own 2018 Employer Health Benefits Survey to estimate the share of employers with at least one health plan that would exceed the cap, with and without FSA contributions, because workers could simply stop using those account to avoid the tax, KFF said.
The tax would affect more employers over time, reaching 37% in 2030 without including FSA contributions, and 46% with them, KFF said.
KFF said it did not attempt to estimate how many employers or employees would pay the tax, only the current plans that would be surpass the thresholds if nothing else changed.
"It is likely many such employers would modify their plans to avoid the tax – for example, offering lower-cost plans, raising deductibles or otherwise shifting costs to workers to avoid the threshold," KFF said.
The England-based company denies any wrongdoing and said the settlement 'is in the best interests of the company and its shareholders.'
Reckitt Benckiser Group plc will pay $1.4 billion to settle criminal and civil investigations into the marketing of the drug maker's opioid addiction treatment drug Suboxone, theDepartment of Justice announced Thursday.
The settlement – so far, the largest involving an opioid drug – includes criminal forfeitures totaling $647 million, civil settlements with the federal and state governments totaling $700 million, and an administrative resolution with the Federal Trade Commission for $50 million, DOJ said.
"It avoids the costs, uncertainty and distraction associated with continued investigations, litigation and the potential for an indictment at a time of significant transformation under RB 2.0 and during CEO transition," the company said.
Suboxone and its active ingredient, buprenorphine, are opioids. The drug is used by recovering opioid addicts to reduce withdrawal symptoms.
According to a federal criminal indictment, Indivior Inc., a one-time subsidiary of RB Group (then known as Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals Inc.) between 2010 and 2014 allegedly took part in an illegal scheme to increase prescriptions of Suboxone across the United States.
Indivior allegedly promoted the film version of Suboxone to healthcare providers and administrators and Medicaid officials as less-divertible and less-abusable than other buprenorphine drugs, even though they had no evidence to back up the claims.
The indictment further alleges that Indivior used its supposed help line for opioid-addicted patients as a conduit to connect them with doctors who would prescribe Suboxone and other opioids to more patients than allowed by federal law, at high doses, and in a "careless and clinically unwarranted manner," DOJ said.
In addition, Indivior announced a "discontinuance" of its tablet form of Suboxone based on supposed "concerns regarding pediatric exposure" to tablets. The real reason why the drug maker discontinued the drug, prosecutors allege, was to delay the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of generic tablet forms of the drug.
Prosecutors said the schemes converted thousands of opioid addicts to Suboxone, which caused state Medicaid programs to expand coverage for the drug at a substantial cost.
To resolve criminal liability, RB Group signed a non-prosecution agreement under which it will forfeit $647 million it earned from Indivior sales and stop the production, marketing and sale of Schedule I, II, or III controlled substances in the United States for three years.
"This is a landmark moment in our fight to hold drug companies responsible for their role in the opioid crisis," Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said in prepared remarks. "We will not allow anyone to put profits over people, or to exacerbate or exploit the opioid crisis for their own benefit."
Under the civil settlement, RB Group will pay $700 million to resolve claims that it's alleged illicit marketing of Suboxone from 2010 through 2014 caused false claims to be submitted to state Medicaid programs.
The $700 million settlement amount includes $500 million to the federal government and up to $200 million to states.
Under a separate agreement with the FTC, RB Group will pay $50 million to resolve claims that it unfairly impeded competition from generic equivalents of Suboxone.
"Buprenorphine products are approved for use in the treatment of Americans struggling to overcome opioid addiction," said Gail Levine, a deputy director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition. "In the middle of the nation’s opioid crisis, RB Group allegedly sought to deny those consumers a lower-cost generic alternative to maintain its lucrative monopoly on the branded drug," she said.
Erika Kelton, a litigator with Phillips & Cohen LLP, who supplied the federal government with whistleblower information about Insys' illegal marketing of its synthetic opioid Subsys, said the RB Group settlement "demonstrate, once again, how misleading statements by pharmaceutical manufacturers can have devastating effects on patients."
"Pharma companies show astonishing disregard for vulnerable patients when they market their opioid products as safer and less susceptible to abuse than other opioid products, when the reality is that they are just as addicting and dangerous," said Kelton, adding that the penalties against RB Group are not severe enough.
"Financial settlements alone do not have a sufficient deterrent effect to really stop this kind of misconduct in the pharmaceutical industry," she said. "As a general matter, people need to be held personally accountable through the threat of incarceration and clawbacks of executives’ compensation and bonuses."
One-third of malpractice cases for death or permanent disability began with an errant or delayed diagnosis, making it the biggest cause of serious harms among medical errors.
Misdiagnoses in treatments for "big three" conditions – cardiovascular events, cancers and infections – comprise 74% of all serious harms from diagnostic errors, according to a new study published Thursday in Diagnosis.
The study also found that 34% of malpractice cases for death or permanent disability began with an errant or delayed diagnosis, making it the biggest cause of serious harms among medical errors.
"We know that diagnostic errors happen across all areas of medicine. There are over 10 thousand diseases, each of which can manifest with a variety of symptoms, so it can be daunting to think about how to even begin tackling diagnostic problems," said study lead author David Newman-Toker, MD, director of the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence, in remarks accompanying the report.
"Our findings suggest that the most serious harms can be attributed to a surprisingly small number of conditions. It still won’t be an easy or quick fix, but that gives us both a place to start and real hope that the problem is fixable," he said.
Sifting through reams of malpractice insurance claims in the national Comparative Benchmarking System database, the researchers analyzed all 11,592 diagnostic error cases between 2006 and 2015 that resulted in $1.8 billion in malpractice payouts over the decade.
"We use malpractice claims to track this issue because there aren’t many measures for diagnostic error. It’s not so much that they are prone to litigation- it is that they often result in significant harm and that can lead to litigation," Newman-Toker said.
They found that misdiagnoses were the most common, catastrophic and costly medical mistakes. Specifically, diagnostic errors that led to death or permanent disability were linked with misdiagnosed cancers (37.8%), vascular events (22.8%) and infections (13.5%) — which led the researchers to refer to them as the "big three."
Within those "big three" areas, the researchers identified 15 specific conditions that combined account for nearly half of all the serious, misdiagnosis-related harms.
The top conditions in each category are stroke, sepsis and lung cancer, respectively. Other most-commonly misdiagnosed conditions include heart attack, venous thromboembolism, aortic aneurysm and dissection, arterial thromboembolism, meningitis and encephalitis, spinal infection, pneumonia, endocarditis, and breast, colorectal, prostate and skin cancers.
The median age of the patients with errant diagnoses was 49, and more than half were female.
For children and young adults under age 20, harms most often were from missed infections (27.6%) rather than vascular events (7.1%) or cancers (9.1%). The reverse was true for middle aged and older adults.
Half of the most-severe harm cases ended in patient death and the other half resulted in permanent disability, the researchers report.
The claims data show that failures of clinical judgment caused more than 85% of the misdiagnosed cases. The researchers said those findings demonstrates that health systems must do more to support clinicians' bedside diagnoses, improve access to specialists, nurture clinician teamwork, and encourage patient engagement in the diagnoses.
The Hopkins researchers also found that 71% of the diagnostic errors took place in either in outpatient clinics, where misdiagnoses were often cancer-related, or emergency departments, for missed infections and vascular events.
Newman-Toker acknowledged a "built-in bias" in the malpractice cases because malpractice attorneys target cases, such as cancer, "since there's usually more of a paper trail."
To account for the bias, the researchers looked at earlier studies that used nonclaims data that still found that roughly three-quarters of diagnostic error cases were associated with the big three disease categories.
Kyle Marcotte of Jacksonville Beach admitted to using rural hospitals in a scheme that kicked back more than $50 million in insurance reimbursements for urine tests.
The owner of a Florida substance abuse treatment center pleaded guilty Tuesday to his role in a pass-through billing scheme that used rural hospitals to launder millions of dollars, the Department of Justice said.
Kyle Ryan Marcotte, 36, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and agreed to forfeit $10.2 million. His sentencing date has not been set, DOJ said.
According to DOJ, Marcotte, the owner of a substance abuse treatment facility in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. In 2015, Marcotte sent his patients' urine samples to a lab that retuned 40% of the insurance reimbursements to Marcotte.
The lab owner then arranged with the managers of Campbellton–Graceville Hospital and Regional General Hospital Williston in Florida to have the testing billed to private insurers through the rural hospitals at a better reimbursement under the hospitals' in-network contracts, DOJ said.
Attempts by HealthLeaders' to contact officials at Campbellton–Graceville Hospital and Regional General Hospital Williston for comment were not successful.
Marcotte also admitted that he brokered deals with other substance abuse treatment centers to have their urine tests billed through the two hospitals in exchange for Marcotte receiving 10% of the insurance reimbursements. The other rehab centers received 30% of the reimbursements, DOJ said.
The lab owner, who was not identified by DOJ, then acquired Chestatee Hospital, in Dahlonega, Georgia, and other rural hospitals, and Marcotte continued to supply samples from his rehab facility and brokered deals with other substance rehab facilities that used those hospitals, DOJ said.
The reimbursements were sent from the hospitals to the lab, which sent them to two companies Marcotte controlled, North Florida Labs and KTL Labs.
Marcotte used the reimbursements from KTL Labs to pay $50 million in kickbacks to at least 88 companies and people operating other rehab facilities who involved in the scheme. The total amount of money involved in the laundering scheme was $57.3 million, DOJ said.
Kidney disease accounts for about $114 billion, or 20%, of all traditional Medicare spending each year.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday launched an initiative that he says could save thousands of lives each year by increasing the transplantable kidney supply, expanding home-based dialysis options, and reducing kidney failure with proactive, preventive care.
"Today we are taking ground-breaking action to bring more hope to millions of Americans suffering from kidney disease. It's a big deal," Trump said Wednesday during a signing ceremony for "Advancing American Kidney Health."
"I've spoken to people (on dialysis). They say the work is so intense, The time is enourmous that they spend. it's like a full time job for people," Trump said. "These patients, their loved ones and for all those impacted by kidney disease, I am here to say we are fighting by your side and we are determined to get you the best treatment anywhere in the world."
Trump said that providing incentives for organ donors and streamlining the kidney procurement and management process could mean that as many as 17,000 additional people could receive kidney transplants, while 11,000 additional people could receive heart, lung, and liver transplants.
"That would be up to 28,000 American lives saved every year, and that numberr could be quite a bit higher if it works the way we anticipate it work," Trump said.
Trump said the initiative could generate as much as $4.2 billion in savings each year because the cost of kidney transplants are significantly lower than the long-term costs of kidney dialysis.
As part of the executive order, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation will release aproposed required payment model and four optional payment models designed to incentivize preventative kidney care, home dialysis, and kidney transplants.
More than 37 million people suffer from chronic kidney disease and more than 726,000 have end-stage renal disease. There are nearly 100,000 Americans waiting on the list to receive a kidney transplant, and kidney disease ranks as the ninth leading cause of death in America, HHS said.
Kidney disease accounts for about $114 billion, or 20%, of all traditional Medicare spending each year, but of the more than 100,000 people who begin dialysis to treat end-stage renal disease each year, one in five will die within a year, HHS said.
"Decades of paying for sickness and procedures in kidney care, rather than paying for health and outcomes, has produced less-than-satisfactory outcomes at tremendous cost," said HHS Secretary Alex Azar, telling the crowd at the signing ceremony that his father suffered from kidney failure.
"Through new payment models and many other actions under this initiative, the Trump Administration will transform this situation and deliver Americans better kidney health, more kidney treatment options, and more transplants," he said.
As part of the executive order, HHS has called for: reducing the number of Americans developing end-stage renal disease by 25% by 2030; having 80% of new ESRD patients in 2025 either receiving dialysis at home or receiving a transplant; and doubling the number of kidneys available for transplant by 2030.
Carmen Peralta, MD, executive director of the Kidney Health Research Collaborative, and CMO at kidney care provider Cricket Health, said it was "exciting to see CMS encourage innovation in a kidney care system that has simply failed patients for too long, while costs have skyrocketed."
"For far too long, the most profitable thing in kidney care has been to place a patient on in-center dialysis," she said. "But what's best for patients is intervening sooner — with early diagnosis, care management to slow progression, support for home dialysis, and time to consider dialysis alternatives such as transplants or conservative care."
The Executive Order also calls for HHS to:
Launch a public awareness campaign about chronic kidney disease, which 40% of American patients do not know they have.
Reform organ procurement and management to increase the transplantable kidney supply.
Expand support for living donors by paying for lost wages and childcare expenses.
HHS will also encourage the development of wearable or implantable artificial kidneys, through cooperation between developers and the Food and Drug Administration, and provide support for KidneyX, the public-private partnership between HHS and the American Society of Nephrology.
Two of the three judges on the panel signaled some sympathy for the arguments raised by the Texas-led group of plaintiff states who challenged the law.
A three-judge panel that heard oral arguments Tuesday afternoon on the legal status of the Affordable Care Act appeared sympathetic to the reasoning that led a lower court to declare all of the sweeping healthcare legislation invalid.
Judges Jennifer Walker Elrod and Kurt Engelhardt, the two judges on the panel who were appointed by Republican presidents, made comments and asked questions that may have signaled a likeliness to agree with at least some of the arguments raised by the Texas-led group of 18 plaintiff states that challenged the law's constitutionality in light of Congress zeroing out the tax penalties tied to the ACA's individual mandate.
However, Engelhardt also questioned why the case that will determine the future of the ACA was being litigated in a courtroom, instead of debated and voted on in Congress.
"There's a political solution here that you, various parties are asking this court to roll up its sleeves and get involved in. Isn't that exactly the point?" Engelhardt said during an exchange with an attorney representing the U.S. House of Representatives. "Isn't that why the Senate isn't here?"
The courts should not become "the taxidermist for every legislative big-game accomplishment that Congress achieves," Engelhardt added.
During a briefing with reporters after the hearing, Robert Henneke, general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which represents two Texas men who've joined the plaintiffs, said the judges appear ready to declare the entire ACA invalid and let lawmakers chart a path forward.
"The greater lesson is that the judges today seem very focused on staying consistent with the law and faithful to their job to uphold the Constitution, but not to come in as a super legislative body to just rewrite the Affordable Care Act," Henneke said.
"Where Congress made a mistake [was] in the way that they created the Affordable Care Act and tied everything to the individual mandate," he added.
"Today's job by the court of appeals is to call balls and strikes and constitutionality and leave it to the Congress and to our state leadership to actually address healthcare policy that will restore choices, doctors, decreased costs, improve access to care for the millions of Americans like my clients that have been injured by the Affordable Care Act," he said.
In rebuttal, a California-led coalition of 20 intervening states and the District of Columbia, recently joined by the U.S. House of Representatives, told the appellate panel that U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor's ruling was flawed.
"The entire Affordable Care Act can cooperate without the individual mandate," California Solicitor General Samuel Siegel told the court, according to CNN, adding that if Congress had wanted to eliminate the law in its entirety it could have done so.
Although a decision by the appellate court could take months, the ruling—whatever the outcome—is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could hear arguments and rule on the case amid the 2020 presidential campaign.
Henneke rejected arguments that Congress never intended to repeal the ACA in its entirety when it zeroed out the individual mandate tax penalty in 2017.
"What they were doing was just passing a tax bill," he told reporters. "So, I disagree with the argument that Congress was purposefully addressing the substantive aspects of the Affordable Care Act," he said. "But it just so happens, the consequences of their actions is what has left Obamacare here today as unconstitutional."
Beyond the questions surrounding the legal status of the ACA, the intervening states said a judicial nullification of the law would wreak chaos for the nation's healthcare system.
They said that more than 20 million people would lose healthcare coverage gained through the Medicaid expansion and Marketplace individual policies created under the ACA, and that important patient projections, such as a ban on restricting coverage for pre-existing conditions, would be eliminated with the law's demise.
The appellate court also considered the legal standing of the intervening states, who had argued that, if O'Connor's ruling was allowed to stand, it would eliminate the Medicaid expansion under the ACA and would cost them about $418 million over a decade.
The third judge on the panel, Carolyn Dineen King, appointed in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, kept quiet throughout the proceedings.
HealthLeaders editor Jack O'Brien contributed to this report.
Although a decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could take months, the outcome is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A three-judge federal appeals court is set this week to hear oral arguments in a case that will determine the future of the Affordable Care Act.
Although a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could take months, it is expected that, whatever the outcome, the ruling will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 90 minutes of oral arguments scheduled for Tuesday, a Texas-led coalition of 18 plaintiff states is expected to urge the appellate court to uphold U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor's ruling in December that invalidated ACA.
O'Connor had agreed with the plaintiff states that the law was nullified in its entirety when Congress zeroed-out tax penalties for the individual mandate in 2017.
In asking the appellate court to overturn O'Connor's ruling, the U.S. House of Representatives and a California-led coalition of 20 intervening states and the District of Columbia are expected to argue that the individual mandate is clearly severable from the ACA.
In addition to hearing oral arguments on the merits of the appeal, however, the appellate court is expected also to take up the legal standing of the intervening states.
The intervening states argue that, if O'Connor's ruling was allowed to stand, it would eliminate the Medicaid expansion under the ACA and would cost them about $418 million over a decade. The intervening states also argue that more than 20 million people will lose healthcare coverage gained through the Medicaid expansion and Marketplace individual policies if the ACA is nullified, and that important safeguards, such as a ban against pre-existing conditions, would be eliminated.
Last week, the appeals court rejected a request by the plaintiff states to delay the oral arguments for at least 20 days. The plaintiff states had sought more time to answer the court's questions regarding the legal standing of the intervening states and the U.S. House of Representatives to appeal the ruling.
The DOJ, which normally takes the lead in defending federal laws, has essentially withdrawn from the case. Although O'Connor's ruling went much farther than the DOJ had urged, the Trump Administration announced in March that it agreed with the plaintiff states and would abandon its partial defense of the ACA and would side with the plaintiff states.
"If the Trump Administration had done its job to defend and protect the healthcare of millions of Americans, we wouldn't be in this mess," California Attorney Xavier General Becerra said in prepared remarks. "Since President Trump refuses to protect Americans' healthcare, California's coalition has picked up his fumble."
Two of the judges hearing Tuesday's oral arguments are Republican appointees: Jennifer Walker Elrod, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2007, and Kurt Engelhardt, who was appointed by President Trump in 2018. Judge Carolyn Dineen King was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
The ACA has proven tough to kill. It's survived more than 70 repeal attempts in Congress, and Supreme Court challenges in 2012 and 2015 since it became law in 2010.
New research suggests that CMS may no longer be able to squeeze any significant savings from its Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program.
Have readmissions penalties jumped the shark?
A new study in Health Affairs finds that 30-day hospital readmissions for hip and knee replacements began to decline rapidly when the federal government announced that it would penalize hospitals for certain readmissions.
In recent years, however, that decline appears to have levelled off, to the point where readmissions reductions are the same as they were before the penalties were initiated, according to researchers from the University of Michigan.
The findings have led researchers to suggested that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services may no longer be able to squeeze any significant savings from its Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program.
Readmissions penalties for pneumonia, heart failure, and acute myocardial infarction were announced in March 2010, and took effect in 2012. Readmissions penalties for hip and knee replacements took effect in 2013.
Using Medicare claims data from 2008 to 2016 for hip and knee replacements, the Michigan researchers evaluated the before-and-after effects of penalty announcements on risk-adjusted readmissions, episode payments, observational status and lengths of stay for the two surgical procedures.
They found that the readmission rates for both surgical procedures fell from 7.6% in 2008 to 5.5% in 2016.
Readmissions rates for the two procedures had already been dropping even before the HRRP was announced for pneumonia, heart failure, and acute myocardial infarction in March 2010. However, the pace of the decline in readmissions for the two procedures doubled after that, even though the procedures—at that point— were not subject to penalties, the researchers found.
The study authors speculate that the efforts hospitals undertook to prevent readmissions of medical patients, such as patient education and post-discharge care coordination, extended to surgical patients.
After hip and knee replacement readmissions penalties were added in mid-2013, however, readmissions for those surgical procedures continued to drop, but slowed to the same rate as before any penalties were announced in 2010, the study found.
Study lead author Karan Chhabra, MD, said in accompanying remarks that the findings "raise the question of whether we're about to reach the floor in our ability to reduce readmissions for these patients."
In the last few years, HRRP has expanded to include other conditions, including heart bypass surgery and sepsis-related pneumonia, with penalties of up to 3% of Medicare earnings.
Chhabra says expanding HRRP will accomplish little.
"Based on the experience so far, it's hard to believe that adding on penalties for more conditions will further bend the curve of readmission," he says.
In fact, related research has identified potential harm to patients in the push to reduce readmissions, as well as concerns that safety net hospitals are adversely penalized because of their generally older, poorer, and sicker patient mix.
"We may be approaching the point for these surgical patients where the unintended consequences of readmissions reduction efforts begin to dominate," Chhabra says. "When you’ve squeezed the possible benefits out, all you have left are harms."
Instead of expanding HRRP penalties, Chhabra says expanding the use of bundled payments could produce better results because hospitals would be incentivized to focus on the entire episode of care, and not just on a relatively narrow metric such as readmissions.
The two hospital systems signed a letter of intent to explore a merger in December 2018.
Miami-based Baptist Health South Florida has finalized its previously announced acquisition of Boca Raton Regional Hospital, the two hospitals announced Monday.
"We foresee an exciting future at Boca Raton Regional Hospital that will cement its title as the preeminent healthcare provider in the community," Baptist Health South Florida CEO Brian E. Keeley said in prepared remarks.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The two nonprofit hospital systems signed a letter of intent to explore a merger in December 2018.
At that time, Keeley said acquiring the 400-bed BHHR made sense because Baptist Health was looking to expand its regional footprint.
"As Baptist Health has grown in recent years to meet the needs of our communities, we have clearly defined our service area as being from Palm Beach County down to the Florida Keys," Keeley said in December. "Boca Raton Regional Hospital will be a strong complement to the services we offer at Bethesda Hospital East and Bethesda Hospital West, along with our outpatient centers in the area."
In May, BRRH named Lincoln S. Mendez as its new CEO to succeed Jerry Fedele when he retires next month. Mendez was CEO at Baptist Health's South Miami Hospital.
“Today’s announcement concludes a process that will elevate our position as an advanced, tertiary academic center," BRRH Board Chair Christine E. Lynn said.
In 2017, Baptist Health merged with Bethesda Hospital East and Bethesda Hospital West in Boynton Beach. The BRRH acquisition brings the number of Baptist Health hospitals to 11.
Baptist Health is the largest healthcare provider in South Florida, with nearly 23,000 employees, more than 4,000 physicians, and more than 100 outpatient centers across four counties.
