Category Archives: Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy

Tower Health cutting 1,000 jobs as COVID-19 losses mount

Posted on by • Posted in Cash, Cash Reserves, Coronavirus, Credit Quality, Credit Ratings, Crisis, Crisis Management, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Elective Procedures, Elective Surgery, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Financially Distressed, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Labor Spend Management, Leadership, Market Consolidation, Market Power, Mergers & Acquisitions, Net Income, Nonoperating Income, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Pandemic, The CARES Act, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured • Leave a comment

https://www.inquirer.com/business/health/tower-health-hospital-layoffs-covid-19-20200616.html

Tower Health cutting 1,000 jobs as COVID-19 losses mount

Tower Health on Tuesday announced that it is cutting 1,000 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce, citing the loss of $212 million in revenue through May because of the coronavirus restrictions on nonurgent care.

Fast-growing Tower had already furloughed at least 1,000 employees in April. It’s not clear how much overlap there is between the furloughed employees, some of whom have returned to work, and the people who are now losing their jobs permanently. Tower employs 12,355, including part-timers.

“The government-mandated closure of many outpatient facilities and the suspension of elective procedures caused a 40 percent drop in system revenue,” Tower’s president and chief executive, Clint Matthews, wrote in an email to staff. “At the same time, our spending increased for personal protective equipment, staff support, and COVID-related equipment needs.”

Despite the receipt of $66 million in grants through the federal CARES Act, Tower reported an operating loss of $91.6 million in the three months ended March 31, according to its disclosure to bondholders.

Tower, which is anchored by Reading Hospital in Berks County, expanded most recently with the December acquisition of St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in a partnership with Drexel University. Tower paid $50 million for the hospital’s business, but also signed a long-term lease with a company that paid another $65 million for the real estate.

In 2017, Tower paid $418 million for five community hospitals in Southeastern Pennsylvania — Brandywine in Coatesville, Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, Jennersville Regional in West Grove, Phoenixville in Phoenixville, and Pottstown Memorial Medical Center, now called Pottstown Hospital, in Pottstown.

Tower’s goal was to remain competitive as bigger systems — the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Jefferson Health from the Southeast, Lehigh Valley Health Network and St. Luke’s University Health Network from the east and northeast, and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center from the west — encroached on its Berk’s county base.

Tower had set itself a difficult task in the best of times, but COVID-19 has made it significantly harder for the nonprofit, which had an operating loss of $175 million on revenue of $1.75 billion in the year ended June 30, 2019.

Because health systems have high fixed costs for buildings and equipment needed no matter how many patients are coming through the door, it’s hard for them to limit the impact of the 30% to 50% collapse in demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Hospitals and all other health service providers were hit with this disruption with lightning speed, forcing the industry to learn in real time how to handle a situation for which there was no playbook,” Standard & Poor’s analysts David P. Peknay and Suzie R. Desai said in a research report last month.

Tower’s said positions will be eliminated in executive, management, clinical, and support areas.

The cuts include consolidations of clinical operations. Tower plans to close Pottstown Hospital’s maternity unit, which employs 32 nurses and where 359 babies were born in 2018, according to the most recent state data. Tower also has maternity units at Reading Hospital in West Reading and at Phoenixville Hospital.

Tower is aiming to trim expenses by $230 million over the next two years, Matthews told staff.

Like many other health systems, Tower has taken advantage of federal programs to ensure that it has ample cash in the bank to run its businesses. Tower has deferred payroll taxes, temporarily sparing $25 million. It received $166 million in advanced Medicare payments in April.

In the private sphere, Tower obtained a $40 million line of credit in April for St. Chris, which has lost $23.6 million on operations since Tower and Drexel bought it in December. Last month, Tower said it was in the final stages of negotiating a deal to sell and then lease back 24 medical office buildings. That was expected to generate $200 million in cash for Tower.

 

 

 

 

Cartoon – Working Remotely Today

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Cartoon, Coronavirus, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Out of Pocket Expenses, Surprise Bills, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured, Working Remotely • Leave a comment

Editorial Cartoons for Friday from Times Wire Services

Surprise medical bills in the coronavirus era

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Balance Billing, Clinical Testing, Consumer Protection, Consumerism, Coronavirus, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, High Deductible Health Plans, High Drug Prices, High Prices, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Rev Cycle Management, Revenue Cycle, Social Distancing, Surprise Bills • Leave a comment

https://www.axios.com/surprise-medical-bills-coronavirus-c61a5529-3272-4edd-b660-35dc61f751b4.html

Surprise medical bills in the coronavirus era - Axios

Rep. Katie Porter recently received an explanation of benefits from her insurer saying that, in addition to the $20 co-pay she paid when she got her coronavirus test, she may be on the hook for an additional $56.60.

The catch: The law requires insurers to cover coronavirus testing without cost-sharing. Porter knows that because she voted for it.

Why it matters: Containing the coronavirus depends on knowing who has it, and it’s going to be much harder to get people to get tested if they think they’ll have to pay for it. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that patients may be vulnerable to surprise coronavirus bills.

Between the lines: Porter, who received a coronavirus test on March 23, has insurance through UnitedHealthcare and shared her explanation of benefits with Axios. Congress has required both the test itself and the associated care to be covered without cost-sharing.

  • In a statement, UnitedHealth Group said it has waived member cost-sharing for coronavirus testing and treatment.
  • “Some members received bills early on when there were not yet specific COVID-19 billing codes and during a period in which code adoption was first taking place,” the company said, adding that it’s waiving those charges and evaluating claims from earlier this year to make sure they were handled correctly.
  • “We are not authorized to talk about [Porter’s] specific situation without permission, however, what likely occurred is that her provider used the wrong billing code for the visit. To confirm if that’s the case and have it corrected, we encourage Rep. Porter to contact us so we can clarify with her directly.”

Yes, but: There’s a huge question of who should have to pay for coronavirus testing as it becomes more prolific, and many insurers — United included — have said that they’ll only cover tests that are “medically necessary,” at least without cost-sharing. It’s unclear who will pay for tests that aren’t deemed medically necessary.

  • The federal government hasn’t said who should pay for testing when, whether it be insurers, employers or the government itself. Insurers are questioning whether they should be on the hook for the hundreds of thousands of tests of asymptomatic people that public health experts say will need to be conducted every day.
  • Even though Congress has tried to resolve payment disputes between insurers and out-of-network labs, there’s a loophole that would allow patients to receive balance bills from out-of-network labs in some circumstances.
  • If a patient sees an out-of-network doctor for a coronavirus test, they’re vulnerable to receiving a surprise medical bill from this provider — just as they are under normal, non-coronavirus conditions, said Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy.

What they’re saying: “We will not be able to truly reopen and rebuild if Americans rightly fear costly medical bills for visiting their health care providers for coronavirus tests,” Porter writes in a letter to top Health and Human Services officials being sent today, asking the administration to implement the law more forcefully.

  • She also asked for “formal, explicit guidance for insurers, providers, employers like nursing homes and assisted living facilities, and testing companies, as well as all 50 states…to ensure patients and workers are not asked to pay any costs.”

 

 

 

 

Predicting COVID-19’s Long-Term Impact on the Home Health Care Market

Posted on by • Posted in American Hospital Association (AHA), Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Coronavirus, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Financially Distressed, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Home Care, Home Health, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Market Consolidation, Medicare, Mergers & Acquisitions, Nursing Home, Out of Pocket Expenses, Palliative Care, Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM), Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance • Leave a comment

Predicting COVID-19’s Long-Term Impact on the Home Health Care Market

Predicting COVID-19's Long-Term Impact on the Home Health Care ...

The Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) and its unintended ripple effects were supposed to be the dominant story this year for the nation’s 12,000 or so Medicare-certified home health care providers. But the coronavirus has rewritten the script for 2020, throwing most of the industry’s previous projections out the window.

While PDGM — implemented on Jan. 1 — will still shape home health care’s immediate future, several other long-term trends have emerged as a result of the coronavirus and its impact on the U.S. health care system.

These trends include unexpected consolidation drivers and the sudden embrace of telehealth technology, the latter of which is a development that will affect home health providers in ways both profoundly positive and negative. Unforeseen, long-term trends will also likely include drastic overhauls to the Medicare Home Health Benefit, a revival of SNF-to-home diversion and more.

Now that providers have had roughly three full months to adapt to the coronavirus and transition out of crisis mode, Home Health Care News is looking ahead to what the industry can expect for the rest of 2020 and beyond.

‘Historic’ consolidation will still happen, with some unexpected drivers

Although the precise extent was often up for debate, most industry insiders predicted some level of consolidation in 2020, driven by PDGM, the phasing out of Requests for Anticipated Payment (RAPs) and other factors.

That certainly appeared to be true early on in the year, with Amedisys Inc. (Nasdaq: AMED), LHC Group Inc. (Nasdaq: LHCG) and other home health giants reporting more inbound calls related to acquisition opportunities or takeovers of financially distressed agencies.

In fact, during a fourth-quarter earnings call, LHC Group CEO and Chairman Keith Myers suggested that 2020 would kick off a “historic” consolidation wave that would last several years.

“As a result of this transition in Q4 and the first few months of 2020, we have seen an increase in the number of inbound calls from smaller agencies looking to exit the business,” Myers said on the call. “Some of these opportunities could be good acquisition candidates, and others we can naturally roll into our organic growth through market-share gains.”

Most of those calls stopped with the coronavirus, however.

Although the vast majority of home health agencies have experienced a decline in overall revenues during the current public health emergency, many have been able to compensate for losses thanks to the federal government’s multi-faceted response.

For some, that has meant taking advantage of the approximately $1.7 billion the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has distributed through its advanced and accelerated payment programs. For others, it has meant accepting the somewhat murky financial relief sent their way under the Provider Relief Fund.

In addition to those two possible sources of financial assistance, all Medicare-certified home health agencies have benefitted from Congress’s move to suspend the 2% Medicare sequestration until Dec. 31.

Eventually, those coronavirus lifelines and others will be pulled back, kickstarting M&A activity once again.

“We believe that a lot of the support has stopped or postponed the shakeout that’s occurring in home health — or that we anticipated would be occurring around this time,” Amedisys CEO and President Paul Kusserow said in March. “We don’t believe it’s over, though.”

Not only will consolidation happen, but some of it will be fueled by unexpected players.

With the suspension of elective surgeries and procedures, hospitals and health systems have lost billions of dollars. Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association (AHA), estimated that hospitals are losing as much as $50 billion a month during the coronavirus.

“I think it’s fair to say that hospitals are facing perhaps the greatest challenge that they have ever faced in their history,” Pollack, whose organization represents the interests of nearly 5,000 hospitals, told NPR.

To cut costs, some hospitals may look to get rid of their in-house home health divisions. It’s a trend that may already be happening, too.

The Home Health Benefit will look drastically different

With a mix of temporary and permanent regulatory changes, including a redefinition of the term “homebound,” the Medicare Home Health Benefit already looks very different now than it did three months ago. But the benefit will likely go through further retooling in the not-too-distant future.

Broadly, the Medicare Part A Trust Fund finances key services for beneficiaries.

While vital to the national health care infrastructure, the fund is going broke — and fast. In the most recent CMS Office of the Actuary report released in April, the Trust Fund was projected to be entirely depleted by 2026.

The COVID-19 virus has only accelerated the drain on the fund, with some predicting it to run out of money two years earlier than anticipated. A group of health care economics experts from Harvard and MIT wrote about the very topic on a joint Health Affairs op-ed published Wednesday.

“COVID-19 is causing the Medicare Part A program and the Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund to contend with large reductions in revenues due to increased unemployment, reductions in salaries, shifts to part-time employment from full time and a reduction in labor force participation,” the group wrote. “In addition to revenue declines, there was a 20% increase in payments to hospitals for COVID-related care and elimination of cost sharing associated with treatment of COVID.”

Besides those and other cost pressures, Medicare is simultaneously expanding by about 10,000 new people every day. The worst-case scenario: the Medicare Part A Trust Fund goes broke closer to 2024.

There are numerous policy actions that can be taken to reduce the financial strain on the trust fund. In their op-ed, for example, the team of Harvard and MIT researchers suggested shifting all of home health care under Part B.

In 2018, Medicare spent about $17.9 billion on home health benefits, with roughly 66% of that falling under Part B, which typically includes community-based care that isn’t linked to hospital or nursing home discharge. Consolidating all of home health care into Part B would move billions of dollars away from Part A, in turn expanding the Trust Fund’s lifecycle.

“Such a policy change would move nearly $6 billion in spending away from the Part A HI Trust Fund but would put upward pressure on the Part B premium,” the researchers noted.

Of course, all post-acute care services may still undergo a transformation into a unified payment model one day. However, the coronavirus has devastated skilled nursing facility (SNF) operators, who were already dealing with the Patient-Driven Payment Model (PDPM), a payment overhaul of their own.

Regulators may shy away from introducing further disruption until SNFs have a chance to recover, a process likely to take years — if not decades.

Previously, the Trump administration had estimated that a unified payment system based on patients’ clinical needs rather than site of care would save a projected $101.5 billion from 2021 to 2030.

Telehealth will be a double-edged sword

The move toward telehealth was a long-term trend that home health providers were cognizant of before COVID-19, even if some clinicians were personally skeptical of virtual visits. But because the virus has demanded social distancing, telehealth has forced its way into health care in a manner that would have been almost unimaginable in 2019.

In late April, during a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing, President Donald Trump indicated that the number of patients using telehealth had increased from about 11,000 per week to more than 650,000 people per week.

Meanwhile, MedStar Health went from delivering just 10 telehealth visits per week to nearly 4,000 per day.

Backed by policymakers, technology companies and consumers, telehealth is likely here to stay.

“I think the genie’s out of the bottle on this one,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in April. “I think it’s fair to say that the advent of telehealth has been just completely accelerated, that it’s taken this crisis to push us to a new frontier, but there’s absolutely no going back.”

The telehealth boom could mean improved patient outcomes and new lines of business for home health providers. But it could also mean more competition moving forward.

For telehealth to be a true game-changer for home health providers, Congress and CMS would need to pave the way for direct reimbursement. Currently, a home health provider cannot get paid for delivering virtual visits in fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has floated the idea of introducing legislation that would allow for direct telehealth reimbursement in the home health space, but, so far, no concrete steps have been taken — at least in public. With a hyper-polarized Congress and a long list of other national priorities taking up the spotlight, it’s impossible to guess whether home health telehealth reimbursement will actually happen.

While home health providers can’t directly bill for in-home telehealth visits, hospitals and certain health care practitioners can. That regulatory imbalance could lead to providers being used less frequently as “the eyes and ears in the home,” some believe.

A new SNF-to-home diversion wave will emerge

Over the past two decades, many home health providers have been able to expand their patient census by poaching patients from SNFs. Often referred to as SNF-to-home diversion, the approach didn’t just benefit home health providers, though. It helped cut national health care spending by shifting care into lower-cost settings.

At first, the stream of SNF residents being shifted into home health care was like water being shot from a firehose: In 2009, there were 1,808 SNF days per 1,000 FFS Medicare beneficiaries, a March 2018 analysis from consulting firm Avalere Health found. By 2016, that number plummeted to 1,539 days per 1,000 beneficiaries — a 15% drop.

In recent years, that steady stream has turned into a slow trickle, with more patients being sent to home health care right off the bat. In the first quarter of 2019, 23.3% of in-patient hospital discharges were coded for home health care, while 21.1% were coded for SNFs, according to data from analytics and metrics firm Trella Health.

Genesis HealthCare (NYSE: KEN) CEO George Hager suggested the initial SNF-to-home diversion wave was over in March 2019. Kennett Square, Pennsylvania-based Genesis is a holding company with subsidiaries that operate hundreds of skilled nursing centers across the country.

“To anyone [who] would want [to] or has toured a skilled nursing asset, I would challenge you to look at the patients in our building and find patients that could be cared for in a home-based or community-based setting,” Hager said during a presentation at the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference. “The acuity levels of an average patient in a skilled nursing center have increased dramatically.”

Yet that was all before the coronavirus.

Over the last three months, more than 40,600 long-term care residents and workers have died as a result of COVID-19, according to an analysis of state data gathered by USA Today. That’s about 40% of the U.S.’s overall death toll.

CMS statistics place that number closer to 26,000.

In light of those figures and infection-control issues in congregate settings, home health providers will see a new wave of SNF-to-home diversion as robust as the first. As the new diversion wave happens, providers will need to be prepared to care for patients with higher acuity levels and more co-morbidities.

“[That’s going to change] the psyche of the way people are going to view SNFs and long-term care facilities for the rest of our generation,” Bruce Greenstein, LHC Group’s chief strategy and innovation officer, said during a June presentation at the Jefferies Virtual Healthcare Conference. “You would never want to put your parent in a facility if you don’t have to. You want options now.”

One stat to back up this idea: Over 50% of family members are now more likely to choose in-home care for their loved ones than they were prior to the coronavirus, according to a survey from health care research and consulting firm Transcend Strategy Group.

Separate from SNF-to-home diversion, hospital-to-home models will also likely continue to gain momentum after the coronavirus.

There will be a land grab for palliative care

Over the past two years, home health providers have aggressively looked to expand into hospice care, partly due to the space’s relatively stable reimbursement landscape. Amedisys — now one of the largest hospice providers in the U.S. — is the prime example of that.

During the COVID-19 crisis, palliative care has gained greater awareness. Generally, palliative care is specialized care for people living with advanced, serious illnesses.

“Right now, we are seeing from our hospital partners and our community colleagues the importance of palliative care, including advanced care as well as appropriate pain and symptom management,” Capital Caring Chief Medical Officer Dr. Matthew Kestenbaum previously told HHCN. “The number of palliative care consults we’re being asked to perform in the hospitals and in the community has actually increased. The importance of palliative care is absolutely being shown during this pandemic.”

As community-based palliative care programs continue to prove their mettle amid the coronavirus, home health providers will increasingly consider expanding into the market to further diversify their services.

Currently, just 10% of community-based palliative care programs are operated by home health agencies.

Demand will reach an all-time high

The home health industry may ultimately shrink in terms of raw number of agencies, but the overall size of the market is very likely to expand at a faster-than-anticipated pace.

In years to come, home health providers will still ride the macro-level tailwinds of an aging U.S. population with a proven preference to age in place — that hasn’t changed. But because of SNF-to-home diversion and calls to decentralize the health care system with home- and community-based care, providers will see an increase in referrals from a variety of sources.

In turn, home health agencies will need to ramp up their recruitment and retention strategies.

There’s already early evidence of this happening.

Last week, in St. Louis, Missouri, four home-based care agencies announced that they were hiring a combined 1,000 new employees to meet the surge in demand, according to the St. Louis Dispatch.

Meanwhile, Brookdale Senior Living Inc. (NYSE: BKD) similarly announced plans to hire 4,500 health care workers, with 10% of those hires coming from the senior living operator’s health care services segment.

Bayada Home Health Care likewise announced plans to ramp up hiring.

“We are absolutely hiring more people now than ever,” Bayada CEO David Baiada previously told HHCN. “The need for services — both because of societal and demographic evolution, but also because of what we anticipate as a rebound and an increase in the demand for home- and community-based care delivery as a result of the pandemic — is requiring us to continue to accelerate our recruitment efforts.”

The bottom line: The coronavirus may have presented immediate obstacles for home health providers, but the long-term outlook is brighter than ever.

 

 

 

 

A 70-year-old man was hospitalized with COVID-19 for 62 days. Then he received a $1.1 million hospital bill, including over $80,000 for using a ventilator.

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, High Deductible Health Plans, High Prices, Intensive Care (ICU), Medicaid, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pandemic, Preexisting Conditions, Rev Cycle Management, Revenue Cycle, Survival Guilt, Ventilators • Leave a comment

https://www.yahoo.com/news/70-old-man-hospitalized-covid-170112895.html

Man, 70, hospitalized with COVID-19 for 62 days gets $1.1 million ...

  • A man in Washington state who spent more than two months in the hospital and more than a month in the Intensive Care Unit with COVID-19 received a 181-page itemized bill that totals more than $1.1 million, The Seattle Times reported.
  • Michael Flor, 70, will likely foot little of the bill due to his being insured through Medicare, according to the report.
  • “I feel guilty about surviving,” Flor told The Seattle Times. “There’s a sense of ‘why me?’ Why did I deserve all this? Looking at the incredible cost of it all definitely adds to that survivor’s guilt.”

A 70-year-old man in Seattle, Washington, was hit with a $1.1 million 181-page long hospital bill following his more than two-month stay in a local hospital while he was treated for — and nearly died from — COVID-19. 

“I opened it and said ‘holy (expletive)!’ ” the patient, Michael Flor, who received the $1,122,501.04 bill told The Seattle Times.

He added: “I feel guilty about surviving. There’s a sense of ‘why me?’ Why did I deserve all this? Looking at the incredible cost of it all definitely adds to that survivor’s guilt.”

According to the report, Flor will not have to pay for the majority of the charges because he has Medicare, which will foot the cost of most if not all of his COVID-19 treatment. The 70-year-old spent 62 days in the Swedish Medical Center in Issaquah, Washington, 42 days of which he spent isolated in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). 

Of the more than one month he spent in a sealed-off room in the ICU, Flor spent 29 days on a ventilator. According to the Seattle Times, a nurse on one occasion even helped him call his loved ones to say his final goodbyes, as he believed he was close to death from the virus.

While in the ICU, Flor was billed $9,736 each day; more than $80,000 of the bill is made up of charges incurred from his use of a ventilator, which cost $2,835 per day, according to the report. A two-day span of his stay in the hospital when his organs, including his kidneys, lungs, and heart began to fail, cost $100,000, according to the report.  

In total, there are approximately 3,000 itemized charges on Flor’s bill — about 50 charges for each day of his hospital stay, according to The Seattle Times. Flor will have to pay for little of the charges — including his Medicare Advantage policy’s $6,000 out-of-pocket charges — due to $100 billion set aside by Congress to help hospitals and insurance companies offset the costs of COVID-19.

Flor is recovering in his home in West Seattle, according to the report.

 

 

 

 

“All policy is health policy”

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Access, Access & Quality of Healthcare, Health Equity, Health Inequity, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Healthcare Reform, Medicaid, Medicaid Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Safety Net Hospitals, Safety-Net Providers, Underinsured, Uninsured • Leave a comment

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-vitals-8873028c-f37e-4712-a53a-ae324c56dbb6.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosvitals&stream=top

PPT - Health in All Policies PowerPoint Presentation, free ...

The effects of racism are often inseparable from black Americans’ health and well-being, as “black communities bear the physical burdens of centuries of injustice, toxic exposures, racism, and white supremacist violence,” Rachel Hardeman, Eduardo Medina and Rhea Boyd write in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Any solution to racial health inequities must be rooted in the material conditions in which those inequities thrive. Therefore, we must insist that for the health of the black community and, in turn, the health of the nation, we address the social, economic, political, legal, educational, and health care systems that maintain structural racism. Because as the Covid-19 pandemic so expeditiously illustrated, all policy is health policy…

The response to the pandemic has made at least one thing clear: systemic change can in fact happen overnight.

 

8 nonprofit health systems got $1.7B bailout, furloughed more than 30,000 workers

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Cash, Cash Reserves, Coronavirus, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Employee Benefits, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Job, Job Market, Job Search, Job Security, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Pandemic, The CARES Act, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/8-nonprofit-health-systems-got-1-7b-bailout-furloughed-more-than-30-000-workers.html?utm_medium=email

Sixty of the largest hospital chains in the U.S., including publicly traded and nonprofit systems, have received more than $15 billion in emergency funds through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, according to an analysis by The New York Times. 

Congress has allocated $175 billion in relief aid to hospitals and other healthcare providers to cover expenses or lost revenues tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first $50 billion in funding from the CARES Act was distributed in April. Of that pool, HHS allocated $30 billion based on Medicare fee-for-service revenue and another $20 billion based on hospitals’ share of net patient revenue. HHS also sent $12 billion to hospitals that provided inpatient care to large numbers of COVID-19 patients and $10 billion to hospitals and other providers in rural areas.

Though one of the goals of the CARES Act was to avoid job losses, at least 36 of the largest  hospital systems that received emergency aid have furloughed, laid off or reduced pay for workers, according to the report.

Approximately $1.7 billion in bailout funds went to eight large nonprofit health systems: Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.; Trinity Health in Livonia, Mich.; Beaumont Health in Southfield, Mich.; Henry Ford Health System in Detroit; SSM Health in St. Louis; Mercy in St. Louis; Fairview Health in Minneapolis; and Prisma Health in Greenville, S.C. Mayo Clinic furloughed or cut hours of about 23,000 workers, and the other seven health systems furloughed or laid off a total of more than 30,000 employees in recent months, according to The New York Times.

The pandemic has taken a financial toll on hospitals across the U.S. They’re losing more than $50 billion per month, according to a report from the American Hospital Association. Of the eight nonprofit systems that collected $1.7 billion in relief aid, several have reported losses for the first quarter of this year, which ended March 31. For instance, Mayo Clinic posted a $623 million net loss, SSM Health’s loss totaled $471 million, and Beaumont and Henry Ford Health System reported losses of $278 million and $235 million, respectively.

Since CARES Act payments were automatically sent to hospitals, some health systems have decided to return the funds. Kaiser Permanente, a nonprofit system, is returning more than $500 million it received through the CARES Act. The Oakland, Calif.-based health system ended the first quarter with a $1.1 billion net loss.

Access the full article from The New York Times here. 

 

 

 

How Many More Will Die From Fear of the Coronavirus?

Posted on by • Posted in Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Chronic Care Management, Chronic Conditions, Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Deferred Healthcare, Emergency Care, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Fear, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, High Deductible Health Plans, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Mortality, Office Visit, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pandemic, Physician, Preexisting Conditions, Preventable Disease, Preventative Care, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Social Distancing, Telemedicine, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured, Unintended Consequences, Virtual Healthcare, Virtual Visit • Leave a comment

Fear of contracting the coronavirus has resulted in many people missing necessary screenings for serious illnesses, like cancer and heart disease.

Seriously ill people avoided hospitals and doctors’ offices. Patients need to return. It’s safe now.

More than 100,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. Beyond those deaths are other casualties of the pandemic — Americans seriously ill with other ailments who avoided care because they feared contracting the coronavirus at hospitals and clinics.

The toll from their deaths may be close to the toll from Covid-19. The trends are clear and concerning. Government orders to shelter in place and health care leaders’ decisions to defer nonessential care successfully prevented the spread of the virus. But these policies — complicated by the loss of employer-provided health insurance as people lost their jobs — have had the unintended effect of delaying care for some of our sickest patients.

To prevent further harm, people with serious, complex and acute illnesses must now return to the doctor for care.

Across the country, we have seen sizable decreases in new cancer diagnoses (45 percent) and reports of heart attacks (38 percent) and strokes (30 percent). Visits to hospital emergency departments are down by as much as 40 percent, but measures of how sick emergency department patients are have risen by 20 percent, according to a Mayo Clinic study, suggesting how harmful the delay can be. Meanwhile, non-Covid-19 out-of-hospital deaths have increased, while in-hospital mortality has declined.

These statistics demonstrate that people with cancer are missing necessary screenings, and those with heart attack or stroke symptoms are staying home during the precious window of time when the damage is reversible. In fact, a recent poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians and Morning Consult found that 80 percent of Americans say they are concerned about contracting the coronavirus from visiting the emergency room.

Unfortunately, we’ve witnessed grievous outcomes as a result of these delays. Recently, a middle-aged patient with abdominal pain waited five days to come to a Mayo Clinic emergency department for help, before dying of a bowel obstruction. Similarly, a young woman delayed care for weeks out of a fear of Covid-19 before she was transferred to a Cleveland Clinic intensive care unit with undiagnosed leukemia. She died within weeks of her symptoms appearing. Both deaths were preventable.

The true cost of this epidemic will not be measured in dollars; it will be measured in human lives and human suffering. In the case of cancer alone, our calculations show we can expect a quarter of a million additional preventable deaths annually if normal care does not resume. Outcomes will be similar for those who forgo treatment for heart attacks and strokes.

Over the past 12 weeks, hospitals deferred nonessential care to prevent viral spread, conserve much-needed personal protective equipment and create capacity for an expected surge of Covid-19 patients. During that time, we also have adopted methods to care for all patients safely, including standard daily screenings for the staff and masking protocols for patients and the staff in the hospital and clinic. At this point, we are gradually returning to normal activities while also mitigating risk for both patients and staff members.

The Covid-19 crisis has changed the practice of medicine in fundamental ways in just a matter of months. Telemedicine, for instance, allowed us to pivot quickly from in-person care to virtual care. We have continued to provide necessary care to our patients while promoting social distancing, reducing the risk of viral spread and recognizing patients’ fears.

Both Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic have gone from providing thousands of virtual visits per month before the pandemic to hundreds of thousands now across a broad range of demographics and conditions. At Cleveland Clinic, 94 percent of diabetes patients were cared for virtually in April.

While virtual visits are here to stay, there are obvious limitations. There is no substitute for in-person care for those who are severely ill or require early interventions for life-threatening conditions. Those are the ones who — even in the midst of this pandemic — must seek the care they need.

Patients who need care at a clinic or hospital or doctor’s office should know they have reduced the risk of Covid-19 through proven infection-control precautions under guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We’re taking unprecedented actions, such as restricting visiting hours, screening patient and caregiver temperatures at entrances, encouraging employees to work from home whenever possible, providing spaces that allow for social distancing, and requiring proper hand hygiene, cough etiquette and masking.

All of these strategies are intended to significantly reduce risk while allowing for vital, high-quality care for our patients.

The novel coronavirus will not go away soon, but its systemic side effects of fear and deferred care must.

We will continue to give vigilant attention to Covid-19 while urgently addressing the other deadly diseases that haven’t taken a pause during the pandemic. For patients with medical conditions that require in-person care, please allow us to safely care for you — do not delay. Lives depend on it.

 

 

 

Hospitals Got Bailouts and Furloughed Thousands While Paying C.E.O.s Millions

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Hospitals Got Bailouts and Furloughed Thousands While Paying ...

Dozens of top recipients of government aid have laid off, furloughed or cut the pay of tens of thousands of employees.

HCA Healthcare is one of the world’s wealthiest hospital chains. It earned more than $7 billion in profits over the past two years. It is worth $36 billion. It paid its chief executive $26 million in 2019.

But as the coronavirus swept the country, employees at HCA repeatedly complained that the company was not providing adequate protective gear to nurses, medical technicians and cleaning staff. Last month, HCA executives warned that they would lay off thousands of nurses if they didn’t agree to wage freezes and other concessions.

A few weeks earlier, HCA had received about $1 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, part of an effort to stabilize hospitals during the pandemic.

HCA is among a long list of deep-pocketed health care companies that have received billions of dollars in taxpayer funds but are laying off or cutting the pay of tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and lower-paid workers. Many have continued to pay their top executives millions, although some executives have taken modest pay cuts.

The New York Times analyzed tax and securities filings by 60 of the country’s largest hospital chains, which have received a total of more than $15 billion in emergency funds through the economic stimulus package in the federal CARES Act.

The hospitals — including publicly traded juggernauts like HCA and Tenet Healthcare, elite nonprofits like the Mayo Clinic, and regional chains with thousands of beds and billions in cash — are collectively sitting on tens of billions of dollars of cash reserves that are supposed to help them weather an unanticipated storm. And together, they awarded the five highest-paid officials at each chain about $874 million in the most recent year for which they have disclosed their finances.

At least 36 of those hospital chains have laid off, furloughed or reduced the pay of employees as they try to save money during the pandemic.

Industry officials argue that furloughs and pay reductions allow hospitals to keep providing essential services at a time when the pandemic has gutted their revenue.

But more than a dozen workers at the wealthy hospitals said in interviews that their employers had put the heaviest financial burdens on front-line staff, including low-paid cafeteria workers, janitors and nursing assistants. They said pay cuts and furloughs made it even harder for members of the medical staff to do their jobs, forcing them to treat more patients in less time.

Even before the coronavirus swept America, forcing hospitals to stop providing lucrative nonessential surgery and other services, many smaller hospitals were on the financial brink. In March, lawmakers sought to address that with a vast federal economic stimulus package that included $175 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services to hand out in grants to hospitals.

But the formulas to determine how much money hospitals receive were based largely on their revenue, not their financial needs. As a result, hospitals serving wealthier patients have received far more funding than those that treat low-income patients, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

One of the bailout’s goals was to avoid job losses in health care, said Zack Cooper, an associate professor of health policy and economics at Yale University who is a critic of the formulas used to determine the payouts. “However, when you see hospitals laying off or furloughing staff, it’s pretty good evidence the way they designed the policy is not optimal,” he added.

The Mayo Clinic, with more than eight months of cash in reserve, received about $170 million in bailout funds, according to data compiled by Good Jobs First, which researches government subsidies of companies. The Mayo Clinic is furloughing or reducing the working hours of about 23,000 employees, according to a spokeswoman, who was among those who went on furlough. A second spokeswoman said that Mayo Clinic executives have had their pay cut.

Seven chains that together received more than $1.5 billion in bailout funds — Trinity Health, Beaumont Health and the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan; SSM Health and Mercy in St. Louis; Fairview Health in Minneapolis; and Prisma Health in South Carolina — have furloughed or laid off more than 30,000 workers, according to company officials and local news reports.

The bailout money, which hospitals received from the Health and Human Services Department without having to apply for it, came with few strings attached.

Katherine McKeogh, a department spokeswoman, said it “encourages providers to use these funds to maintain delivery capacity by paying and protecting doctors, nurses and other health care workers.” The legislation restricts hospitals’ ability to use the bailout funds to pay top executives, although it doesn’t stop recipients from continuing to award large bonuses.

The hospitals generally declined to comment on how much they are paying their top executives this year, although they have reported previous years’ compensation in public filings. But some hospitals furloughing front-line staff or cutting their salaries have trumpeted their top executives’ decisions to take voluntary pay cuts or to contribute portions of their salary to help their employees.

The for-profit hospital giant Tenet Healthcare, which has received $345 million in taxpayer assistance since April, has furloughed roughly 11,000 workers, citing the financial pressures from the pandemic. The company’s chief executive, Ron Rittenmeyer, told analysts in May that he would donate half of his salary for six months to a fund set up to assist those furloughed workers.

But Mr. Rittenmeyer’s salary last year was a small fraction of his $24 million pay package, which consists largely of stock options and bonuses, securities filings show. In total, he will wind up donating roughly $375,000 to the fund — equivalent to about 1.5 percent of his total pay last year.

A Tenet spokeswoman declined to comment on the precise figures.

The chief executive at HCA, Samuel Hazen, has donated two months of his salary to a fund to help HCA’s workers. Based on his pay last year, that donation would amount to about $237,000 — or less than 1 percent — of his $26 million compensation.

“The leadership cadre of these organizations are going to need to make sacrifices that are commensurate with the sacrifices of their work force, not token sacrifices,” said Jeff Goldsmith, the president of Health Futures, an industry consulting firm.

Many large nonprofit hospital chains also pay their senior executives well into the millions of dollars a year.

Dr. Rod Hochman, the chief executive of the Providence Health System, for instance, was paid more than $10 million in 2018, the most recent year for which records are available. Providence received at least $509 million in federal bailout funds.

A spokeswoman, Melissa Tizon, said Dr. Hochman would take a voluntary pay cut of 50 percent for the rest of 2020. But that applies only to his base salary, which in 2018 was less than 20 percent of his total compensation.

Some of Providence’s physicians and nurses have been told to prepare for pay cuts of at least 10 percent beginning in July. That includes employees treating coronavirus patients.

Stanford University’s health system collected more than $100 million in federal bailout grants, adding to its pile of $2.4 billion of cash that it can use for any purpose.

Stanford is temporarily cutting the hours of nursing staff, nursing assistants, janitorial workers and others at its two hospitals. Julie Greicius, a spokeswoman for Stanford, said the reduction in hours was intended “to keep everyone employed and our staff at full wages with benefits intact.”

Ms. Greicius said David Entwistle, the chief executive of Stanford’s health system, had the choice of reducing his pay by 20 percent or taking time off, and chose to reduce his working hours but “is maintaining his earning level by using paid time off.” In 2018, the latest year for which Stanford has disclosed his compensation, Mr. Entwistle earned about $2.8 million. Ms. Greicius said the majority of employees made the same choice as Mr. Entwistle.

HCA’s $1 billion in federal grants appears to make it the largest beneficiary of health care bailout funds. But its medical workers have a long list of complaints about what they see as penny-pinching practices.

Since the pandemic began, medical workers at 19 HCA hospitals have filed complaints with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about the lack of respirator masks and being forced to reuse medical gowns, according to copies of the complaints reviewed by The Times.

Ed Fishbough, an HCA spokesman, said that despite a global shortage of masks and other protective gear, the company had “provided appropriate P.P.E., including a universal masking policy implemented in March requiring all staff in all areas to wear masks, including N95s, in line with C.D.C. guidance.”

Celia Yap-Banago, a nurse at an HCA hospital in Kansas City, Mo., died from the virus in April, a month after her colleagues complained to OSHA that she had to treat a patient without wearing protective gear. The next month, Rosa Luna, who cleaned patient rooms at HCA’s hospital in Riverside, Calif., also died of the virus; her colleagues had warned executives in emails that workers, especially those cleaning hospital rooms, weren’t provided proper masks.

Around the time of Ms. Luna’s death, HCA executives delivered a warning to officials at the Service Employees International Union and National Nurses United, which represent many HCA employees. The company would lay off up to 10 percent of their members, unless the unionized workers amended their contracts to incorporate wage freezes and the elimination of company contributions to workers’ retirement plans, among other concessions.

Nurses responded by staging protests in front of more than a dozen HCA hospitals.

“We don’t work in a jelly bean factory, where it’s OK if we make a blue jelly bean instead of a red one,” said Kathy Montanino, a nurse treating Covid-19 patients at HCA’s Riverside hospital. “We are dealing with people’s lives, and this company puts their profits over patients and their staff.”

Mr. Fishbough, the spokesman, said HCA “has not laid off or furloughed a single caregiver due to the pandemic.” He said the company had been paying medical workers 70 percent of their base pay, even if they were not working. Mr. Fishbough said that executives had taken pay cuts, but that the unions had refused to take similar steps.

“While we hope to continue to avoid layoffs, the unions’ decisions have made that more difficult for our facilities that are unionized,” he said. The dispute continues.

Apparently anticipating a strike, a unit of HCA recently created “a new line of business focused on staffing strike-related labor shortages,” according to an email that an HCA recruiter sent to nurses.

The email, reviewed by The Times, said nurses who joined the venture would earn more than they did in their current jobs: up to $980 per shift, plus a $150 “Show Up” bonus and a continental breakfast.

 

 

 

 

The patients stayed away—will they come back?

Posted on by • Posted in Clinical Testing, Communication, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Emergency Care, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Fear, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Marketing, Mortality, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Social Distancing, Trust, Urgent Care • Leave a comment

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Emergency Department Patient Resources

A new analysis from the CDC this week confirmed what we have been hearing anecdotally from health systems for several weeks—as the coronavirus lockdown took hold, there was a precipitous drop in visits to hospital emergency departments. According to the study, visits were down by 42 percent in the month of April compared to the previous year, and despite a rebound in May, were still 26 percent lower than a year ago. Visits in the Northeast dropped the most, as did those among women, and children under 14.

Although visits for minor ailments and symptoms declined the most, even more disconcerting was the drop in visits for chest pain, echoing the concern we’ve heard in many parts of the country that many patients may have suffered minor heart attacks without being treated, or may have waited to be seen until significant damage had been done.

As non-emergent visits have begun to return to many facilities, we continue to hear that emergency department and urgent care volume remains relatively low.

Survey data indicate that patients are fearful of becoming infected with coronavirus if they visit healthcare facilities—especially, it seems, ones where they’ll be forced to wait.

While many providers are investing in messaging campaigns to assure patients it’s safe to return, this nightmarish first-person account by one healthcare insider provides a useful cautionary tale.

Visiting a surgeon for a pre-op consult, she found the experience of visiting a COVID-era hospital downright dystopian. Simply touting safety precautions by itself won’t make patients more comfortable—they’ll need to see and feel that measures are in place to make time spent in a care setting as efficient and reassuring as possible. Otherwise, like the insider in question, they’ll take their business elsewhere. There’s work to be done.