The federal government’s hospital penalty program finishes its first decade by lowering payments to nearly half the nation’s hospitals for readmitting too many Medicare patients within a month. Penalties, though often small, are credited with helping reduce the number of patients returning for another Medicare stay within 30 days.
“Obstetrical emergency departments” are a new feature in some hospitals that can inflate medical bills for even the easiest, healthiest births. Just ask the parents of Baby Gus.
The state’s unique health system controls what hospitals can charge for services.
The pandemic has so seriously strained already tight state psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Virginia, Texas and elsewhere that these facilities for the poorest and most vulnerable people with mental illness struggle to admit new patients.
Managers are trapped in a pricey hiring cycle, competing for critical care nurses who can monitor covid patients on life support. Some hospitals are looking abroad to replace staffers who quit to become travel nurses or leave the profession.
The law says nonprofit hospitals are supposed to offer low-income patients financial assistance. But the average person doesn’t know about it. Here’s how to get help.
In a practice dating to the 1980s, many hospitals require people with alcohol-related liver disease to complete a period of sobriety before they can be added to the waiting list for a liver. But this thinking may be changing.
Health care workers already bore the brunt of workplace violence in the U.S. Now, tensions from an exhausting pandemic are spilling over into hospitals.
At issue is whether transplant patients who refuse the shots are not only putting themselves at greater risk for serious illness and death from covid-19, but also squandering scarce organs that could benefit others.
In Maryland, it’s now illegal for a hospital to sue a patient who qualifies for charity care. But in many other states, that’s still a thing.
