As hospitals are criticized for skimping on financial assistance, Santa Clara County has agreed to notify 43,000 former patients of possible billing reductions as part of a settlement. Some patients had sued, alleging the county’s hospital system sent them to collections for bills they shouldn’t have received.
A Biden administration proposal would help standardize the data on prices that hospitals provide to patients, increase its usefulness to consumers, and boost enforcement. Previous rules gave hospitals too many loopholes.
After decades of unchecked mergers, health care is the land of giants, with huge medical systems monopolizing care in many cities, states, and even whole regions of the country. This decreases patient choice, impedes innovation, erodes quality of care, and raises prices. And federal regulators have been slow to act.
A union is asking Los Angeles city voters to cap hospital executive pay at the U.S. president’s salary. However, hospitals accuse the union of using the proposal as political leverage, and policy experts question whether the policy, if enacted, would be workable.
Within two years of North Carolina’s public university system going into business with AccessOne to finance patients’ payment plans, nearly half of its patients were in loans that charged interest. As federal scrutiny increases on lenders, KFF Health News is sharing that contract and others obtained through public records requests.
This brief explains the role of federal and state antitrust agencies in challenging anticompetitive practices among hospitals and other health care providers, including the legal authority of federal and state agencies, the role that they play in enfor…
Medicare was supposed to cover the entire cost of his procedure. But after the anesthesia provider failed to file its claims in a timely manner, it billed the patient instead.
The Fresno Bee reports that Madera Community Hospital has reached an agreement with Adventist Health to take over the bankrupt facility and avoid liquidation.
Medical and RV industry professionals say hospitals that offer RV parking are easing access to health care for some patients who drive long distances for treatment, like many rural residents.
Congress has until October to avert cuts to a Medicaid program intended to support safety-net hospitals that, in practice, improves the bottom lines of other hospitals, too. Hospital leaders say now is not a good time for the cuts — which lawmakers have so far postponed 13 times.
