Cartoon – Importance of Transparency
Monthly Archives: December 2020
Cartoon – Baseless Allegations
Cartoon – Look at those Sheep
Cartoon – The Mindless Sheep
Cartoon – State of the Union
Cartoon – Critical Leadership Character Flaw
Nashville nurse, two roommates charged in large Halloween house party
Nashville police are criminally charging three women including a registered nurse for violating Metro Health orders after hosting a large house party on Halloween.
Roommates Madilyn Dennington, Bailey Mills and Olivia Noe, all 23, were issued misdemeanor citations in connection with an Oct. 31 football watch party at their East Nashville home on the 1200 block of Boscobel Street south of Fatherland Street.
Police spokesman Don Aaron said the women were served with court summonses on Monday and are slated to appear on the charges Dec. 16.
According to an arrest affidavit, officers responded about 6:30 p.m. to a complaint about a loud party at the home, heard music blaring and saw several people in the yard. In all, police said they found more than 100 people inside and outside the home.
When officers spoke to Dennington, Mills and Noe outside, they told police they had organized a watch party at their home for a football game, the affidavit states. The officers told the women that at that time, no more than 25 people were permitted to gather in Davidson County unless the gathering was approved by the city.
The women then went inside and told everyone to leave, police reported.
Police then alerted Metro Health officials about the party. Hugh Atkins, Metro Health’s environmental health services director, confirmed the Health Department did not receive an event application for the gathering.
Early last week, Nashville instituted a “rule of eight,” limiting both public and private events to eight people as the holidays approached — down from the previous 25-person cap. Tighter capacity restrictions on restaurants and bars went into effect in the city on Monday.
On Tuesday, Davidson County reportedan increase of 851 cases in 24 hours — the second-highest ever daily increase. So far 369 people in Nashville have died from the virus.
Meanwhile, Monday’s statewide numbers marked a record high increase in cases. The Tennessee Department of Health announced an increase of 7,975 cases and 48 deaths over the previous 24 hours. So far the virus had caused 4,602 deaths statewide.
A nurse and her roommates
Dennington is a registered nurse at TriStar Skyline Medical Center, authorities said.
It was not immediately known whether the hospital had taken any disciplinary action against Dennington. She did not return an immediate request for comment and blocked her Facebook page from a Tennessean reporter shortly after being contacted.
“Properly following pandemic regulations is extremely important to help reduce the spread of COVID-19,” Anna-Lee Cockrill, a spokeswoman for TriStar, said regarding the party. “We are looking into this further.”
According to their social media pages, all three roommates formerly attended the University of Mississippi before moving to Nashville, and Dennington and Noe both graduated from the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Noe and Mills also could not immediately be reached for comment.
More than 50 arrests, 315 citations
Police data shows at least 50 people have been arrested and more than 315 have been cited under local emergency health orders that went into effect earlier this year.
Just this weekend, Nashville police issued nine citations and made one arrest after people refused to wear face masks in public, a mandated action in Davidson County.
As of late November at least dozen people had been arrested on Class A misdemeanor charges after police said they held large house parties and events. Some of them entertained as many as 600 people at a time, police reported. If convicted, they face up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
As of Tuesday, only one of the arrested defendants had pleaded guilty: Jeffrey Mathews, a 36-year-old Goodlettsville dentist arrested for throwing an Aug. 1 house party on Fern Avenue in East Nashville. He was one of two men criminally charged for the party that drew hundreds.
Mathews, who apologized for his actions, was sentenced to three months of probation and eight hours of community service. His co-defendant, Christopher “Shi” Eubank, 40, remained at large Tuesday after failing to appear in court in October for a hearing on three counts of violating emergency health orders.
This is a developing story.
Hospital workforce tracker: layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts
Many hospitals are temporarily or permanently reducing the size of their workforce as they grapple with depleted revenues and the thorny question of when they can return to normal operating capacity. Here’s a tracker to follow the latest updates.
Hospitals across the country, financially battered as they face the dual challenges of sick COVID-19 patients and a precipitous decline in patient volume, are struggling to balance quickly shifting staffing needs. While some face and others brace for intense demand, many have announced furloughs of specialists and others that work in elective surgeries that have been drastically scaled back.
Thousands of healthcare workers at hospitals big and small have been asked not to return to work, and it’s still unclear how soon non-essential services will return. While some governors announce plans to reopen businesses, others have extended stay-at-home orders.
Most recent data from the U.S Bureau of Labor doesn’t cover the second half of March or early April, but during the first half of March, the healthcare industry shed 43,000 jobs — reversing a decade of growth in the sector. According to BLS data, the industry added 49,000 jobs in March 2019.
“Even our emergency room has seen a significant drop in patients coming in,” Sue Philips, an ICU nurse at Palomar Pomerado Health in Northern San Diego, told Healthcare Dive.
Phillips is a spokesperson with National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses union. Palomar Health, which runs three medical centers in northern San Diego County, recently instituted 21-day temporary layoffs of 221 employees.
On April 28, Palomar announced that most of those layoffs were becoming permanent. The system laid off 5% of its workforce, eliminating 317 positions. Fifty of those employees were clinical RNs, mostly in part-time positions, and the rest spread across the organization ranging from clerical staff to technicians.
Due to a 50% decrease in patient volumes, Palomar lost $10 million in revenue in March alone, according to a statement. In April the system said it stands to lose $20 million or more.
“I’m an ICU nurse, so my job is pretty much protected,” Phillips said. “But you didn’t think you were expendable until you became expendable, and that’s a hard pill for nurses and caregivers to swallow.”
Congress has attempted to financially support struggling hospitals through ongoing coronavirus relief legislation, approving some $175 billion thus far. But without knowing what will come next, hospitals are attempting to remain nimble while reining in one of their most costly expenses — paying employees.
The following information is based on publicly reported data, along with interviews with hospital representatives and union members.
It’s not an exhaustive list, but features nonprofit and for-profit hospital systems that reported revenue above $10 billion in 2019. It also takes a look at smaller, more regionally based systems that have announced similar cutbacks.
Use the dropdown to find a company (Click on link above to access layoff tracker)
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FTC signals nurses’ wages will become important measure in antitrust enforcement
The Federal Trade Commission is revamping a key tool in its arsenal to police competition across a plethora of industries, a development that could have direct implications for future healthcare deals.
In September, the FTC said it was expanding its retrospective merger program to consider new questions and areas of study that the bureau previously has not researched extensively.
One avenue it will zero in on is labor markets, including workers and their wages, and how mergers may ultimately affect them.
It’s an area that could be ripe for scrutinizing healthcare deals, and the FTC has already begun to use this argument to bolster its case against anticompetitive tie-ups. Prior to this new argument, the antitrust agency — in its legal challenges and research — has primarily focused on how healthcare mergers affect prices.
The retrospective program is hugely important to the FTC as it is a way to examine past mergers and produce research that can be used as evidence in legal challenges to block future anticompetitive deals or even challenge already consummated deals.
“I do suspect that healthcare is a significant concern underlying why they decided to expand this program,” Bill Horton, an attorney with Jones Walker LLP, said.
So far this year, the FTC has tried to block two proposed hospital mergers. The agency sued to stop a proposed tie-up in Philadelphia in February between Jefferson Health and Albert Einstein Healthcare Network.
More recently, the FTC is attempting to bar Methodist Le Boneheur in Memphis from buying two local hospitals from Tenet Health in a $350 million deal.
In both cases, the agency alleges the deals will end the robust competition that exists and harm consumers in the form of higher prices, including steeper insurance premiums, and diminished quality of services.
The agency has long leaned on the price argument (and its evidence) to challenge proposed transactions. However, recent actions signal the FTC will include a new argument: depressed wages, particularly those of nurses.
In a letter to Texas regulators in September, the FTC warned that if the state allowed a health system to acquire its only other competitor in rural West Texas, it would lead to limited wage growth among registered nurses as an already consolidated market compresses further.
As part of its arguments, the FTC pointed to a 2020 study that researched the effects on labor market concentration and worker outcomes.
Last year, the agency sent orders to five health insurance companies and two health systems to provide information so it could further study the affect COPAs, or Certificates of Public Advantage, have on price and quality. The FTC also noted it was planning to study the impact on wages.
FTC turned to review after string of defeats
A number of losses in the 1990s led the agency to conduct a hospital merger retrospective, Chris Garmon, a former economist with the FTC, said. Garmon has helped conduct and author retrospective reviews.
Between 1994 and 2000, there were about 900 hospital mergers by the U.S Department of Justice’s count. The bureau lost all seven of the cases they attempted to litigate in that time period, according to the DOJ.
The defendants in those cases succeeded by employing two types of defenses. The nonprofit hospitals would argue they would not charge higher prices because as nonprofits they had the best interests of the community in mind. Second, hospitals tried to argue that their markets were much larger than the FTC’s definition, and that they compete with hospitals many miles away.
Retrospective studies found evidence that undermined these claims. That’s why the studies are so important, Garmon said.
“It really is to better understand what happens after mergers,” Garmon said. It’s an evaluation exercise, given many transaction occur prospectively or before a deal is consummated. So the reviews help the FTC answer questions like: “Did we get it right? Or did we let any mergers we shouldn’t let through?”
FTC moves to block New Jersey hospital acquisition
- The Federal Trade Commission is suing to block New Jersey’s largest health system, Hackensack Meridian Health, from acquiring a close competitor, Englewood Health. That system operates Englewood Hospital, an independent hospital and one of the last in the area, according to the Star-Ledger.
- After the tie-up, Hackensack would control three of the six acute care hospitals in Bergen County, the most populated county in the state.
- The loss of competition between the two would leave insurers with few options and would allow Hackensack to obtain higher prices from insurers, leading to higher premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs for consumers, the FTC alleged in a statement Thursday.
In each case, the FTC has argued the deals would eliminate close competitors and lead to higher costs and lower quality of care.
Hackensack Meridian Health announced the intent to merge in October 2019.
At the time, Hackensack said Englewood would become a tertiary hub for Hackensack with a focus on a slew of services lines including cardiovascular care, neurosciences and oncology. Englewood said it would also benefit from the affiliations Hackensack enjoyed with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
As part of the announcement, Hackensack committed to invest $400 million in Englewood Health.
Hackensack operates its flagship hospital, Hackensack University Medical Center, and partially owns Pascack Valley Medical Center, which are both within 10 miles of Englewood Hospital, according to the FTC.
HENRY KOTULA 