Healthcare Roundup: Medicare Payments Up, Prime Acquires New Hospital, Gender Bias in Health Insurance, and More

Medicare reimbursement mini-roundup — Doctors will get a 1.1 percent bump in Medicare payments starting in January, and additional bonuses for using e-prescribing technology. Meanwhile, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services will hike hospital outpatient payments by 3.6 percent, but held rates for ambulatory surgical centers flat. And CMS decided not to finalize profit-sharing agreements and incentives related to physician self-referrals, deciding it needed more input to reach a final decision. [Source: Modern Healthcare 1, 2, 3]

Prime Healthcare takes over Shasta hospital – The California hospital chain agreed to take over Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding, Calif. The previous owner, Hospital Partners of America, filed for bankruptcy protection in September. Prime Healthcare is known for aggressively pursuing a strategy known as “balance billing,” in which its hospitals bill patients for emergency-room care charges in excess of what their insurance will cover. [Source: Modern Healthcare]

Women pay more for health insurance than men — An NYT report found that women can pay up to 50 percent more than men for health-insurance policies in the individual market, even when gender-specific benefits such as maternity care are omitted from the comparison. The disparities extend across policies offered by Humana, Aetna, UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint’s Anthem subsidiaries. [Source: NYT]

Compromised patient records top 1,000 at UCLA — California state officials said hospital employees improperly accessed records of more than 1,000 patients at the UCLA Hospital System. The case grew out of initial reports that employees had surreptitiously peeked into the files of celebrity patients such as Maria Shriver, Farrah Fawcett and Britney Spears. [Source: LAT]

AMA calls generics-related insurer payments “kickbacks” – The American Medical Association blasted the managed-care practice of paying doctors to prescribe generic drugs as “kickbacks” and said such physicians could face federal criminal and civil liability. Some states have moved to ban or curtail the practice. [Source: AP/Houston Chronicle]

Kaiser Family Foundation launches health-news service — The new, purportedly independent, Kaiser Health News service will launch in the early part of 2009. It will be run by former WSJ healthcare reporter Laurie McGinley and Peggy Girshman, formerly an NPR producer and editor at Congressional Quarterly. [Source: Kaiser Family Foundation]

Obama’s ads stress healthcare reform — Joe Paduda of Managed Care Matters notes that Democratic presidental nominee Barack Obama has spent $113 million on healthcare-related ads, more than eight times as many as his Republican opponent, John McCain. Fully 86 percent of Obama’s recent ads have featured healthcare reform. [Source: Managed Care Matters]

Health Wonk Review is up at HealthBlawg — For a review of the blogosphere’s best healthcare-related commentary and analysis, see the latest edition of Health Wonk Review, ably compiled by David Harlow at HealthBlawg. [Source: Healthblawg]