Surprise bills are just the latest weapons in a decades-long war among health care industry players over who gets to keep the fortunes generated each year from patient illness: $3.6 trillion in 2018. The practice is an outrage, yet no one in the health care sector wants to unilaterally make the type of big concessions that would change things.
By writing in payment limits when signing hospital forms, patients might have leverage in negotiations over disputes that arise from surprise medical bills.
Insurance giant Cigna and San Francisco-based Dignity Health have failed to ink a 2020 contract, leaving nearly 17,000 patients in California and Nevada scrambling to find new health care providers. Meanwhile, Dignity faces financial and legal challenges while it strives to implement its merger with Catholic Health Initiatives, which created one of the nation’s largest Catholic hospital systems.
Medicare cut payments for 786 hospitals because of high infection and complication rates. They included a third of the hospitals proclaimed as the nation’s best in one prominent ranking.
As the Democratic primary campaign nears pivotal voting, important aspects of health care policy are being overlooked.
A young man averted medical disaster after a friend took him to the nearest hospital just before his appendix burst. But more than a year later, he’s still facing a $28,000 balance bill for his out-of-network surgery.
A number of radiology organizations are trying to end the decades-old practice of shielding patients from radiation with lead aprons. They say it provides no benefit and might even inadvertently expose people to higher radiation levels. But the policy about-face is moving slowly.
Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health care policy stories each week, so you don’t have to.
For years, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, one of California’s largest nonprofit hospitals, has been spending less on charity care than other nonprofit hospitals in the state. Now it is expanding eligibility for free and discounted medical care.
People with sickle cell disease aren’t fueling the opioid crisis, research shows. Yet some ER doctors still treat patients seeking relief for agonizing sickle cell crises as potential addicts.
