Tag: hospitals

March 23, 2021

A cost-saving change in Medicare launched in the final days of the Trump administration will cut payments to hospitals for some surgical procedures while potentially raising costs and confusion for patients. For years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services […]

January 29, 2021

In America’s health care system, dominated by hospital chain leviathans, New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina, is an anomaly. It is a publicly owned hospital that boasts good care at lower prices than most and still flourishes […]

January 13, 2021

Last week, after finishing inoculations of some front-line hospital staff, Jupiter Medical Center was left with 40 doses of precious covid vaccine. So, officials offered shots to the South Florida hospital’s board of directors and their spouses over age 65. […]

January 11, 2021

Keely Connolly thought she would be safe once the ambulance arrived at Hutchinson Regional Medical Center in Kansas. She was having difficulty breathing because she’d had to miss a kidney dialysis treatment a few days earlier for lack of child […]

December 14, 2020

If there’s such a thing as a date with destiny, it’s marked on Dr. Taison Bell’s calendar. At noon Tuesday, Bell, a critical care physician, is scheduled to be one of the first health care workers at the University of […]

December 2, 2020

Hospitals in much of the country are trying to cope with unprecedented numbers of COVID-19 patients. As of Monday, 96,039 were hospitalized, an alarming record that far exceeds the two previous peaks in April and July of just under 60,000 […]

November 24, 2020

Registered nurse Pascaline Muhindura has spent the past eight months treating COVID patients at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri. But when she returns home to her small town of Spring Hill, Kansas, she’s often stunned by what she […]

November 20, 2020

With its choice of a new leader, the Florida Hospital Association has signaled that seeking legislative approval to expand Medicaid to nearly 850,000 uninsured adults won’t be among its top priorities. In October, Mary Mayhew became the association’s CEO. Mayhew, […]

November 10, 2020

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued guidance and an accompanying one-pager to help employers understand which standards are most frequently cited during coronavirus-related inspections. OSHA based these documents on data from citations issued, […]

November 2, 2020

Nearly half the nation’s hospitals, many of which are still wrestling with the financial fallout of the unexpected coronavirus, will get lower payments for all Medicare patients because of their history of readmitting patients, federal records show. The penalties are […]

September 22, 2020

David Usher is sitting on $1.7 million he’s scared to spend. The money lent from the federal government is meant to help hospitals and other health care providers weather the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet some hospital administrators have called it a […]

September 10, 2020

Nurses at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center were on edge as early as March when patients with COVID-19 began to show up in areas of the hospital that were not set aside to care for them. The Centers for Disease […]

August 3, 2020

The proposed merger of a well-regarded secular hospital system and a larger Roman Catholic system in Washington state has triggered new alarms about religious restrictions on patients’ access to care. Virginia Mason Health System and CHI Franciscan announced plans in […]

July 31, 2020

These days, Los Angeles acting teacher Deryn Warren balances her pain with her fear. She’s a bladder cancer patient who broke her wrist in November. She still needs physical therapy for her wrist, and she’s months late for a cancer […]

June 10, 2020

CLEVELAND, Ohio — In late March, Andrea Laquatra began to feel sick. At first, it was an overwhelming fatigue, and the 32-year-old Cleveland mother of two tried to push through it. A fever, headaches and body aches soon followed. Then […]

June 8, 2020

The U.S. health care system is famously resistant to government-imposed change. It took decades to create Medicare and Medicaid, mostly due to opposition from the medical-industrial complex. Then it was nearly another half-century before the passage of the Affordable Care […]

May 19, 2020

Children have largely escaped the ravages of COVID-19, but children’s hospitals have not eluded the financial pain the pandemic has wrought on health care providers. Pediatric hospitals offered themselves as backups to their adult counterparts in case of a surge […]

March 8, 2019

With much fanfare, federal officials required hospitals nationwide this year to post their “list” prices online. But it’s not yet clear how many are doing it, even as the government has taken the rare step of asking consumers to monitor […]

September 26, 2018

On orders from Congress, Medicare is easing up on its annual readmission penalties on hundreds of hospitals serving the most low-income residents, records released last week show. Since 2012, Medicare has punished hospitals for having too many patients end up […]

April 24, 2018

Being old and sick in America frequently means a doctor won’t ask you about troublesome concerns you deal with day to day — difficulty walking, dizziness, a leaky bladder, sleep disturbances, memory lapses and more. It means that if you’re […]