Virginia Mason Health System and CHI Franciscan announced plans in July to merge 12 hospitals and more than 250 other treatment sites in the Puget Sound region and the Yakima area. Some patient advocacy groups warn the proposal would jeopardize access to needed services, such as emergency termination of pregnancies, contraception and physician aid in dying.
Americans are avoiding hospitals and clinics by the millions, even when they shouldn’t, and many experts expect a jump in preventable disease diagnoses after the COVID crisis eases. Paradoxically, the pandemic may have been good for some heart patients, however.
This analysis examines list prices for COVID-19 testing at the largest hospitals in every state and finds they range widely from $20 to $850. Federal law now requires private insurers to cover COVID-19 tests at no cost to the patient and provides fundi…
Democrats want to bind employers to follow a safety plan, while Republicans seek to shield employers and doctors from lawsuits.
Attorneys say some state workers’ compensation laws leave workers and families struggling for benefits after a COVID illness or death.
Unlike earlier in the year, most hospitals are not proactively canceling elective surgeries, even in some places seeing spikes in coronavirus patients.
This issue brief analyzes hospital payments paid by private payers and by Medicare for a selection of inpatient services, including services requiring similar inpatient treatments to those used for COVID-19. It finds that private insurance payments for…
While federal and state officials continue to wrangle over coronavirus testing, the population testing positive is skewing younger. Meanwhile, the Trump administration wins a round in court over its requirements for hospitals to publicly reveal their prices, and the fight over the fate of the Affordable Care Act heats up once again. Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times, Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post and Kimberly Leonard of Business Insider join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss this and more. Also, Rovner interviews former Obama administration health aide Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who has written a new book comparing international health systems.
With stay-at-home orders in place, hospitals experimented with delivering many treatments to patients where they lived. They were a success. As society reopens, the return of old payment practices may prevent the adoption of this new, efficient model of care.
Six months after agreeing to a $575 million settlement in a closely watched antitrust case filed by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Sutter Health has yet to pay a single dollar, and no operational changes have gone into effect. The nonprofit health care giant was accused of using its market dominance in Northern California to […]
