Archived California Healthcare News

The Cleveland Clinic, one of the largest hospitals in the country, has cut its charity care spending — or the cost of free care provided to patients who can’t afford to pay — to $101 million in 2014 compared with $171 million in 2013. Hospital officials credited the federal health law for the improvement. “The decrease in charity care is primarily attributable to the increase in Medicaid patients due to the expansion of Medicaid eligibility in the State of Ohio and the resulting decrease in the number of charity patients,” the hospital’s year-end financial statement reported.

Michael Kitchell, M.D., initially welcomed the federal government’s new quality incentives for doctors. His medical group in Iowa has always scored better than most in the quality reports that Medicare has provided doctors in recent years, he said. But when the government launched a new payment system that will soon apply to all physicians who accept Medicare, Kitchell’s McFarland Clinic in Ames didn’t win a bonus. In fact, there are few winners: out of 1,010 large physician groups that the government evaluated, just 14 are getting payment increases this year, according to Medicare.

Dan Swangard, M.D., knows what death looks like. As a physician, he has seen patients die in hospitals, hooked to morphine drips and overcome with anxiety. He has watched dying drag on for weeks or months as terrified relatives stand by helplessly. Swangard was diagnosed in 2013 with a rare form of metastatic cancer.

Several factors, including the state’s rejection of Medicaid expansion, are conspiring to put some Kansas hospitals at risk. Two southeast Kansas hospitals — one in Independence, the other in Fort Scott — are among several that might have to close their doors.

’s largest health insurer. Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealthcare, which covers approximately one-fourth of Missourians, has changed the way it handles something known as “balance billing” — the difference between the provider’s charge and the amount allowed by the insurer.

King v. Burwell is on the brains of health insurance executives. The case was an ongoing topic of conversation at Wednesday\'s annual Keenan Summit in Los Angeles, which is sponsored by Keenan, Torrance-based large group insurance broker. The two-day conference is held in both Oakland and L.A. on consecutive days.

A San Diego-area group of emergency room physicians has reached a settlement with the Department of Managed Health Care regarding the balance billing of hundreds of patients they treated. Under the terms of the agreement with the agency, the Emergency Services Medical Corp. (ESMC) of Solano Beach has agreed to stop balance billing patients, and has also filed a plan of correction with the agency.

The recent legislative hearings on Medicaid expansion brought representatives from dozens of powerful groups to the Statehouse. Lobbyists representing hospitals, doctors and some big businesses pleaded with members of the House Health and Human Services Committee to approve an expansion proposal one day. The next, representatives of conservative, anti-tax organizations urged committee members to continue to say ‘no’ to expansion, despite the billions of additional federal dollars it would inject into the Kansas economy.

California\'s hospitals have seen a dramatic spike over the last decade in the number of patients being treated for heroin overdoses. New data released by the Office of Statewide Planning and Development (OSHPD) shows a nearly doubling in the number of patients overdosing on heroin being treated at hospital emergency rooms or admitted as inpatients between 2005 and the first half of last year. The numbers tend to confirm national numbers released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, and tend to suggest an epidemic of hard drug use by whites in relatively affluent parts of the state.