The problem is that hospitals are big and getting bigger, going from building to buildings to campuses. They are expensive and getting more expensive. At some point, we have to ask: is this really how we want to spend our healthcare dollar? Some hospitals are figuring other ways to spend their -- I mean, "our" -- money on our health. Take Nationwide Children's Hospital. Located in a somewhat blighted neighborhood of Columbus (OH), its Healthy Neighborhoods Healthy Families (HNHF) program "treats the neighborhood as the patient," as their summary in Pediatrics put it. The hospital is leading a partnership that has built 58 affordable housing units, renovated 71 homes, given out 158 home improvement projects, and helped spur a 58 unit housing/office development. They've also hired 800 local residents and instituted a jobs training program.
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America’s Healthcare Secret Pricing Scandal Exposed
For everyone who is literally sick and tired of being held ransom by a corrupt healthcare system where insurance companies, their lobbyists, hospital networks, and pharmaceutical companies have had the upper hand by keeping us in the pricing dark, Pratter believes it is time for the unsustainability and unfairness of secret pricing and crippling “surprise” medical bills to stop. This article exposes America’s secret pricing scandal like never before and how it is carefully and purposefully crafted. A review of several self-insured companies’ medical bills has led to the following conclusions. They call their pricing proprietary. We call it secret and unethical. Take your secretly priced anti-nausea medicine and keep reading.
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First, We Tear Down All the Hospitals
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Hospital CEOs Behaving Badly And The Devastating Consequences On The Middle Class
When big health insurers propose mergers, it makes for good antitrust enforcement theater to try to block them. However, if government officials want to address anti-competitive activities that have a dramatically bigger impact, they should shift their focus to local market provider M&A activity that consistently show prices increase after the deal is done. However, the most rapacious, anti-competitive practices I’ve seen in my entire career have come from hospitals–frequently from tax-exempt “nonprofits” that would make John D. Rockefeller blush with their brutal actions. The combined impact has created a middle class economic depression that has driven populist presidential campaign success, which was highlighted in a recently released Brookings study.
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Hospital Spending Far Below Premium Increases
Spending on hospital care grew the fastest of all healthcare expenditures over the past year, according to a new report from Altarum Health.
Hospital spending increased 6.4 percent between August 2010 and August 2011, compared to slightly more than 5 percent for prescription drugs, 4 percent for nursing homes, and slightly more than 2 percent for home healthcare. Read More »
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Huge Federal Sanction For Affinity (Oh) Medical Center
A federal Administrative Law Judge has issued a scathing ruling against Affinity Medical Center of Massillon, Oh. finding the hospital guilty of multiple violations of federal labor law in refusing to recognize and bargain with its registered nurses, terminating a long term Affinity RN for union activity, and illegally threatening other RNs for advocating for patient safety. Read More »
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In The Hospital, A Bad Translation Can Destroy A Life
Translating from one language to another is a tricky business, and when it comes to interpreting between a doctor and patient, the stakes are even higher. Consider the story of 18-year-old baseball player Willie Ramirez. In 1980, Ramirez was taken to a South Florida hospital in a coma, says Helen Eby, a certified medical interpreter in Oregon. "His family apparently used the word 'intoxicado' to talk about this person," she says. "Well, 'intoxicado' in Spanish just means that you ingested something. It could be food; it could be a drug; it could be anything that has made you sick"...
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Uncontrolled Health Care Costs Traced to Data and Communication Failures
The previous section of this article provided whatever detail I could find on the costs of poor communications and data exchange among health care providers. But in truth, it’s hard to imagine the toll taken by communications failures beyond certain obvious consequences, such as repeated tests and avoidable medical errors. One has to think about how the field operates and what we would be capable of with proper use of data. As patients move from PCP to specialist, from hospital to rehab facility, and from district to district, their providers need not only discharge summaries but intensive coordination to prevent relapses. Our doctors are great at fixing a diabetic episode or heart-related event...
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