Word: reformations
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...Saints [Hospital] is in the business of flipping beds," Jackie tells a colleague. "That's it. End of story. The fact that you have even the slightest inclination to help people puts you miles ahead of 100% of the population." (In real life, Falco is a health-care-reform activist.) Jada Pinkett Smith also plays an overworked nurse taking on bureaucracy, on TNT's Hawthorne. On NBC's fall drama Trauma (not to be confused with CBS's Miami Trauma), a supervisor warns a paramedic not to let a mother assist with her son's emergency tracheotomy...
Even as Congress struggles with how to pay for health-care reform, the White House keeps doing its best to accentuate the positive. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden hosted the country's three largest hospital trade groups as they announced they will accept $155 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts over the next 10 years. It's all part of an inspiring storyline, the idea that everyone is doing their part to make this most ambitious undertaking a reality. But no one actually thinks that the hospitals - or for that matter other key players like pharmaceutical manufacturers or doctors...
Buried in the 850-page House health-reform draft is a provision that could in effect ban further construction of doctor-owned, for-profit specialty hospitals and prohibit existing ones from expanding. (The provision would prevent new facilities from receiving any Medicare payments and would limit changes to current facilities.) Senators Charles Grassley and Max Baucus, who lead the body's powerful Finance Committee, have been vocal critics of the doctor-owned specialty-hospital model and the industry expects similar language to be included in any upcoming Senate health-reform bill as well. Doctor-owned specialty hospitals would "wither...
...procedures in fields like orthopedics and cardiology. There are now some 220 such facilities operating mostly in the South and Midwest - up from 110 in 2001 - generating some $40 billion in annual revenue. According to Sandvig, more than 80 additional facilities are currently under development. (Read "Starting Health-Care Reform...
Perhaps an even more pressing problem in the context of health reform is the risk of overutilization of services. According to a 2006 report from the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, just the presence of a doctor-owned heart hospital in a community increases the rate of cardiac surgery by 6% among Medicare beneficiaries. The upshot, according to a House staffer involved in health reform, is that "people are getting things they probably don't need." Plus, says the staffer, "the community hospitals go to war, bulk up their own specialty centers and all of a sudden you see these...