Less than 15 percent of registered voters support, and 53 percent oppose requiring every American to provide proof of private health insurance or face tax penalties or other fines, according to a new poll by Consumer Watchdog, a consumer protection group that has been active since 1985. While the survey was conducted in response to a new reform plan from AHIP, the insurance industry...
Health Care Industry Archive
December 2008
At a time when survival is on the mind of every hospital executive, are healthcare leaders letting up on quality improvement? Not according to Donald Berwick, president of the Boston-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement, which has long led the charge for hospital quality and safety. He said that there’s a lot of enthusiasm among hospital execs for IHI’s “5 Million Lives” campaign,...
For a rare look at how hospitals compete for the commodities that really matter to them — primarily patients and their insurance coverage — check out a rough and sometimes brutal war Tenet Healthcare has waged with its larger rival HCA in El Paso, Tex., for much of the last past year. The weapons in this case are discounts and “exclusive provider” arrangements that...
Last week, the Cleveland Clinic broke new ground by requiring its staff members — particularly physicians — to publicly disclose their financial ties to pharma/biotech companes, medical-device makers and other companies. The American Public Media show Marketplace did a segment on such conflicts and what we can realistically expect to achieve by disclosure, and reporter Janet Babin...
Clinics get hit by layoffs — Park Nicollet Health Services and North Memorial Health Care, both in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, are terminating 600 workers and 233 employees, respectively. Both organizations include outpatient clinics as well as hospitals and other facilities. Their pink-slip announcements follow hundreds of layoffs from Allina Hospitals and Clinics and Fairview Health...
The economic storm isn’t affecting only hospitals. Physicians are feeling the deep freeze as well, as patients either avoid office visits or put off needed tests and procedures, say health-care consultants. Just how much medical practices have been affected is shown by an American Hospital Association study that was conducted in October. More than half of the hospital executives surveyed said...
Peer review in hospitals is a very contentious area of medicine. Some critics of the process, which can prevent doctors from having their hospital privileges renewed, say that politically powerful doctors sometimes use peer review to force out competitors. Other critics say that peer review is rarely effective at weeding out incompetent physicians. What’s undeniable is that peer review, as it...
Despite all the hype about consumer-directed care and the ability of financially motivated patients to make good health-care buying decisions, it’s long been known that most consumers don’t pay attention to the increasing amount of web-based information about doctors and hospitals. A new study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (CSHSC) shows that none of the “transparency”...
As the economy worsens, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) is asking the state legislature for rapid passage of a bill that would change how individual insurance is regulated and who pays for it in Michigan, which has a 9.3 percent unemployment rate, higher than any other state except Rhode Island. BCBSM wants the state to loosen limits on its rate increases and toughen requirements for...
UnitedHealth Group plunged into the world of consumer health information on Dec. 1, when its wellness and disease management subsidiary, OptumHealth, unveiled a consumer-oriented web site called myOptumHealth.com. Patterned after similar sites operated by WebMD, Revolution Health, and the Mayo Clinic, myOptumHealth offers a wide array of healthcare information for free to all visitors, whether...
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