Category Archives: Hospital Industry

Study: Copper ICU Beds Mostly Untarnished by Bacteria

Posted on by • Posted in Copper, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Acquired Infections, Hospital Industry, Infection Control, Quality of Care • Leave a comment

https://www.medpagetoday.com/criticalcare/infectioncontrol/83224?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2019-11-09&eun=g885344d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Top%20Cat%20HeC%20%202019-11-09&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition

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Converting from plastic surfaces could cut risk of HAIs, researchers argue.

Hospital beds with copper surfaces in an intensive care unit had significantly fewer bacteria than hospital beds with plastic surfaces, even after daily cleaning and disinfection, researchers found.

Active colony forming units per 100 cm2 on beds with copper rails, foot boards, and bed controls were less than 10% of those seen on conventional beds (median 42 vs 594), reported Michael Schmidt, PhD, of Medical University in South Carolina in Charleston, writing in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

“The findings indicate that antimicrobial copper beds can assist infection control practitioners in their quest to keep healthcare surfaces hygienic between regular cleanings, thereby reducing the potential risk of transmitting bacteria associated with healthcare associated infections,” Schmidt said in a statement.

The authors explained that “metallic copper surfaces kill bacteria through a multi-modal mechanism through its ability to disrupt bacterial respiration, generate superoxide, and destroy genomic and plasmid DNA in situ.”

Studies have found that not only does environmental contamination play a role in transmitting pathogens responsible for healthcare-acquired infections, the investigators added, but copper-containing surfaces had reduced bacterial burdens.

Nevertheless, Schmidt noted, acute-care hospital beds on which all high-risk surfaces are copper have only recently become available.

“Based on the positive results of previous trials, we worked to get a fully encapsulated copper bed produced. We needed to convince manufacturers that the risk to undertake this effort was worthwhile,” he said.

This was a pragmatic cross-over study performed in a medical intensive care unit at a single medical center, which monitored the bacterial burden of control beds from April 2017 to July 2018, and interventional beds from April 2018 to March 2019 — noting a mixture of intervention and control beds from April to July 2018, as copper beds were introduced when a patient was discharged from a control bed.

Beds were thoroughly cleaned after patient discharge, and high-touch surfaces were routinely disinfected, as part of daily cleaning protocols, the authors said. Not surprisingly, they found that control beds accumulated higher concentrations of bacteria across all sampled areas, with the tops of the bed rails the most heavily soiled.

To put this into context, the authors noted that 89% of the samples collected from the control beds exceed the benchmark terminal cleaning and disinfection risk threshold compared to 9% from the copper beds, and 42% of copper beds were free of detectable bacteria.

In fact, the area with the heaviest bacterial burden on the copper bed was the internal, patient-facing surface of the foot board — though it was significantly lower than the comparative location on the control foot board, the authors noted.

One barrier to implementing this solution could be the cost of copper beds, but Schmidt and colleagues argued it would ultimately cost less than other adjunct cleaning options. Encapsulating a bed with antimicrobial copper would cost approximately $2,200 per bed, amortized over 5 years for a total of $1.20 per bed per day. The authors said that additional daily cleaning ($12-$13/room), ultraviolet radiation ($10/room), or hydrogen peroxide vapor phase deposition ($100/room) would be much more expensive.

“The copper intervention … is the only adjunct to act continuously, actively killing bacteria … and only adding a modest increase to the environmental services/infection control budget,” they wrote. “The value delivered by this intervention to the infection control bundle warrants further studies to assess its impact on HAI rates ultimately leading to consideration for its adoption.”

 

Retail makes its case, telehealth and voice tech dominate: 6 takeaways from HLTH19

Posted on by • Posted in Chronic Care Management, Competition, Consumerism, Disruption, Disruptive Technology, Funding Disruption, Health Insurance Industry, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Innovation, Leadership, Retail Healthcare, Social Determinants of Health, Telemedicine • Tagged • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/retail-makes-its-case-telehealth-and-voice-tech-dominate-6-takeaways-from/566548/

Headlines at HLTH 2019 included a peek behind the curtain at the secretive healthcare division of tech giant Google from ex-Geisinger CEO David Feinberg, Uber’s newly inked deal with Cerner and a preventive health push by Facebook sparking renewed data privacy concerns.

On the government side, outgoing head of CMS’ innovation center Adam Boehler suggested industry will be pleased with his replacement and CMS Administrator Seema Verma promised further Medicaid deregulation and “humility” in government.

But the four-day conference last week also covered some broader themes, including retail’s presence in the industry, the rise of telehealth and voice tech and the challenges of interoperability. Here are six of the biggest takeaways from Las Vegas.

Retail still defining its role in healthcare

Executives from Walmart and CVS taking to the main stage at HLTH to tout their initiatives.

Walmart’s VP of transformation, Marcus Osborne, talked up the company’s first health superstore in Dallas, Georgia, which opened this fall. The center provide patients with primary care, dental care, vision care and psychiatric and behavioral health counseling, with the goal of providing an integrated healthcare experience in the traditionally underserved area. Lab services and imaging are available on-site, as are nutrition and fitness classes.

“When you give consumers options, they engage more,” Osborne said. “The healthcare system is designed to be complex when it should be simple.”

A primary care visit at Walmart Health Center costs a flat fee of $40. For an adult, getting a dental checkup and cleaning costs $50, and an eye appointment is $45. Therapy services are $1 per minute.

The store pits the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer directly against CVS Health, which is expanding its own health-focused clinics, called HealthHUBs, to 13 new markets by the end of next year.

Brick-and-mortar behemoths’ attempts to position themselves as the front door to healthcare are spurred by the increasing push of consumerism in healthcare.

“With the emergence of this retail health consumer, we’ve got to make healthcare more integrated than it’s been for several years now,” CVS CEO Larry Merlo said.

Limits of consumerism

But engagement is notoriously tricky, and consumerism can only take the industry so far. Healthcare startups providing a new way of accessing or managing care, like digital chat startups allowing consumers to talk via text with a remote physician or chronic care management companies, are struggling to establish trust with the consumer.

Hank Schlissberg, president of care manager Vively Health, a subsidiary of DaVita that assumes full risk for its population, compared the sea change in the industry to what’s happened with companies like AirBnB.

“I sleep in someone else’s bed. I shower in their shower. And we’ve convinced ourselves that’s totally normal,” he said. “All I want to do is provide people with free healthcare. And convincing people of that is much harder than we expected.”

Natalie Schneider, VP of Digital Health for Samsung, agreed, telling Healthcare Dive consumers are “routinely irrational” and don’t act in their own best interests. But “we’re seeing policyholders, health plans and others in healthcare not only account for this irrationality, but also capitalize on it” through incentives like providing a reward immediately following a healthy behavior.​

The wearables trend is a key example, experts said. Payers and providers alike are increasingly turning to the tech in an effort to engage consumers in wellness, fitness and preventive care activities. However, the ROI of trackers, whether from Apple Watch, Fitbit, Samsung or others, is still unproven.

“We’ve seen a lot of technologies and they’re often not that smart and very rarely wearable,” Tom Waller, who heads up the R&D lab of athleisure retailer lululemon, said. “We’re still patiently waiting for that perfect contextualization of data that will give us both a physical and emotional insight, and that we can use to augment an existing behavior to nudge someone in the right way.”

“At the end of the day, these patients are consumers, and consumers have been trained over the last 10 years to decide what quality they want, to decide when they want it and how they want to get it,” Robbie Cape, CEO of primary care startup 98point6, said. “Healthcare hasn’t caught up to that.”

Execution could stymie looming interoperability rules

Two rules to halt information blocking from HHS are expected to be finalized any day now. Despite the regulatory pressure, industry is “still a ways from true interoperability,” said Ed Simcox, CTO and acting CIO of HHS, due to a slew of factors like a lack of economic incentive for EHR vendors.

The rules would impose a slate of new requirements on healthcare companies. Payers in federal programs would have to provide their 125 million patients with free electronic access to their personal health data by the end of next year; healthcare companies would have to adopt standardized application programming interfaces allowing their disparate software systems to communicate; and any player found information blocking could be fined up to $1 million per violation.

Google Cloud’s director of global healthcare solutions, Aashima Gupta, warned that although the government might mandate new standards, that doesn’t mean industry will be able or willing to immediately adhere to them.

Additionally, the government is still playing catch-up to technology, and interoperability is no different, Pranay Kapadia, CEO of voice-enabled digital assistant Notable, told Healthcare Dive. The rules are the “right thing to do, and then there’ll be an evolution of it, and then there’ll be another evolution of it.”

​”This problem is much bigger than big tech or government or health systems or innovators,” Gupta said. “It’s an ecosystem problem. No player can do it alone.”

Despite the private sector’s uncertainly, Don Rucker, the head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, said interoperability had fostered price and business model transparency in every other U.S. industry over the past few decades.

“Healthcare is just about the last one to resist,” Rucker said. “I don’t think that will be much longer.”

Telehealth and voice tech: the belles of the ball

Telehealth was unsurprisingly a big focus at HLTH, with themes touching on expansion to complex care needs, followup visits and chronic care management and barriers like state physician licensure.

It’s an “efficiency mechanism” that can help a lot in areas like primary care, Teladoc COO David Sides told Healthcare Dive.

Voice-enabled tech was another focus of chatter in Las Vegas. The technology, which allows physicians free use of their hands while enabling them to take notes or write a script, for example, is currently experiencing heavy hype from industry and Silicon Valley as a way to streamline the heavy EHR and documentation requirements on physicians.

Talking is an “important element to how people interface with things,” Notable’s Kapadia said. “You have to think of things from a human perspective.”

Suki also announced at HLTH it expanded its relationship with Google’s cloud computing business. The digital assistant’s CEO, Punit Soni, told Healthcare Dive industry could expect to hear about two “very, very large deployment announcements” with health systems in the near future as providers become more comfortable levering the software to cut down documentation time for clinicians.

Solving for social determinants, preventive health

A slew of players rolled out initiatives targeting social determinants of health in Las Vegas.

​Uber Health is now available for providers to schedule non-emergency rides for their patients via Cerner’s EHR platform in a bid to provide better access to transportation for underserved populations. The one-year-old NEMT division of San Francisco-based Uber has roughly 1,000 partnerships across payers, healthcare tech companies and providers such as Boston Medical Center.

“You need to develop a benefit that serves the needs of your distinct population,” Jami Snyder, director of Arizona’s Medicaid and CHIP programs, said. The state recently partnered with ride-hailing company and Uber rival Lyft to provide rides for eligible Medicaid beneficiaries.

Kaiser Permanente rolled out a food insecurity initiative to connect eligible California residents with CalFresh, the state’s supplemental nutrition assistance or food stamp program. The integrated, nonprofit health system plans to reach out via text and mail to more than 600,000 Kaiser Permanente health plan members with a goal of getting 100,000 enrolled in CalFresh by spring 2020.

If the program is successful, Kaiser plans to expand it to the rest of the country, CEO Bernard Tyson, noting “healthcare across the ecosystem of health plays a very small part” in outcomes. “Things like behavior, genetics and where you live has a bigger impact.”​

On the preventive health side, Facebook launched a consumer health tool. Users plug in their age and sex in return for targeted heart, cancer and flu prevention measures, with information supplied by healthcare groups like the American Cancer Society.

The pilot for the $7 billion tech behemoth will be evaluated for six months to a year before being expanded to other preventable conditions to make consumers their “own health advocates,” Freddy Abnousi, Facebook’s head of health research, said. “The lion’s share of health outcomes is driven by social and behavioral variables.”

CVS is similarly working to combat SDOH factors by leveraging its reams of consumer data, Firdaus Bhathena, the retail pharmacy giant’s CDO, told Healthcare Dive. If someone doesn’t pick up their prescription, “there’s a number of ways we can engage with them,” including by text message or speaking to services in the local town, to see if transportation to the pharmacy, a lack of funds or some other issue is stopping the person from receiving the medication they need.

Funding disruption

Much of the industry runs today like non-healthcare companies ran 50 or 60 years ago, according to entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

“For that reason, they’re ripe for disruption,” Cuban said at HLTH.

Investors and startups alike are taking note. Venture capitalists, eager to fund new medical solutions and methods of care delivery, pumped $26.3 billion into more than 1,500 healthcare startups in just the first 10 months of 2018.

Providers looking to invest in new solutions or acquire startups are looking for a relatively mature corporate structure and an alignment with existing priorities in-house, according to Dan Nigrin, SVP and CIO at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“It starts with our organizational strategy,” agreed Rebecca Kaul, VP at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. An attractive startup presents “something that really drives change,” she said. “If you’re pitching a solution that isn’t at a given time part of our strategy, it may not be the right time for us to connect.”

Highmark Health CEO David Holmberg told Healthcare Dive its physicians lead system-wide conversations in what areas need investment. “Ultimately, that’s how you’ll get things to scale.”

Intermountain Healthcare is similarly interested in ways to manage and inject value into its operations. “We’re not interested in point solutions,” Dan Liljenquist, SVP of the Salt Lake City-based nonprofit provider said, adding he deletes and blocks emailed pitches he receives. “We’re interested in technologies that obviate the need for clinical interventions, that help people solve their own problems, and the way to do that is not a point solution but in a systemic, creative way.”

Payers have similar priorities and seek out companies to invest in that could provide value down the road. Cigna Ventures, which recently invested in precision medicine company GNS Healthcare, looks for new tools across the areas of insight and analytics, digital health and retail and all-around care delivery and enablement, for example.

“We’re looking for companies that are innovative and looking to solve important problems,” Tom Richards, global strategy and business development leader at Cigna, told Healthcare Dive, noting most companies start with a more focused solution and then expand.

For example, chronic disease platform Omada Health, which raised $50 million in a 2017 funding round led by Cigna Ventures, started with diabetes, but has since expanded its care management services to hypertension, Type 2 diabetes and behavioral and mental health.

 

 

 

 

 

CMS retains 340B, site-neutral payment cuts in final hospital payment rule

Posted on by • Posted in American Hospital Association (AHA), Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), District Court, District Court of Appeals, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicaid, Medicare, Medicare 340B Drug Discount Program, Medicare Site Neutral Payment, Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS), Safety Net Hospitals, Safety-Net Providers • Leave a comment

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals-health-systems/cms-retains-340b-site-neutral-payment-cuts-final-hospital-payment-rule?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal&mrkid=959610&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWTJZd1pqWXpZbVUwWTJKbSIsInQiOiJLV2JJQWM1clQ3OVBiaURjdFVUUUg2K093U21XZm0zVHNPa1hTUjdTWEdxSWZpYklsako0TVMrZFYxazVGZHFkOHJ3M1pWNlwvYW5pVWpPcjM1TEtVRnErOWgxU3NKc1dcLzk3TnZTc1pLZVI0Ymcrb0V1ZEZ2eDh1djFwa1FlaW50In0%3D

billing statement from a doctor's office

The Trump administration finalized a hospital payment rule Friday that retains proposed cuts to off-campus clinics and the 340B drug discount program. 

The changes outlined in the hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) rule come despite both cuts being struck down in legal challenges and amid major pushback from providers.

Site-neutral payments

The agency decided to move ahead with the two-year phase-in of the cuts to outpatient services for clinic visits furnished in an off-campus hospital outpatient setting. The goal is to bring payments to off-campus clinics in line with standalone physicians’ offices.

“With the completion of the two-year phase-in, the cost sharing will be reduced to $9, saving beneficiaries an average of $14 each time they visit an off-campus department for a clinic visit in [calendar year] 2020,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said in a fact sheet.

However, the two-year project that was supposed to start in 2019 has been halted because of a federal court ruling.

CMS decided to move forward with the cuts for off-campus clinics.

“The government has appeal rights, and is still evaluating the rulings and considering, at the time of this writing, whether to appeal the final judgment,” the agency said.

The American Hospital Association (AHA) said that the site-neutral payment rule was misguided and that CMS ignored the recent court ruling. 

“There are many real and crucial differences between hospital outpatient departments and the patient populations they serve and other sites of care,” said Tom Nickels, executive vice president of the AHA, in a statement.

CMS also finalized a proposed cut for the 340B program that cuts payments by 22.5% in 2020.

CMS has installed prior cuts in 2018 and 2019 to the program that requires drug companies to provide discounts to safety-net hospitals in exchange for getting their products covered on Medicaid.

However, a court ruling has struck down the cuts, and CMS is currently appealing the decision.

CMS said that it hopes to conduct a 340B hospital survey to collect drug acquisition cost data for 2018 and 2019, and the survey will craft a remedy if the appeal doesn’t go their way.

“In the event the 340B hospital survey data are not used to devise a remedy, we intend to consider the public input to inform the steps we would take to propose a remedy for CYs 2018 and 2019 in the CY 2021 rulemaking,” the agency said.

Hospital groups commented that CMS should drop both the 340B and site-neutral cuts because of the legal challenges.

Several groups weren’t happy that the cuts were still there.

“The agency also prolongs confusion and uncertainty for hospitals by maintaining unlawful policies it has been told to abandon in clear judicial directives,” said Beth Feldpush, senior vice president of policy and advocacy for America’s Essential Hospitals, in a statement Friday.

The hospital-backed group 340B Health added that CMS needs to stop this “unfunny version of ‘Groundhog Day’ and restore Medicare payments for 340B hospitals to their legal, statutory level.”

 

 

 

Execs flirt with ‘Medicare for All’ at HLTH19

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, ACA, Health Insurance Industry, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare for All, Single Payer Healthcare System • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/execs-flirt-with-medicare-for-all-at-hlth19-despite-trump-admin-warnings/566373/

Despite Trump administration warnings about “Medicare for All” and other expansions of public coverage upending the private market, some executives at HLTH last week seemed more agnostic about the Democrat-backed plans, some of which would eliminate private insurance altogether.

​”It’s a symptom of a pricing issue, and a rate issue,” Vivek Garpialli, CEO of Medicare Advantage plan provider Clover Health, said. “Until we see a better idea, it’s actually not a bad framework to have a debate around and, unless a better one comes along in the next three, five, 10 years, it probably is inevitable.”

Democratic candidates hoping to take on incumbent President Donald Trump in 2020 are pitching a slate of proposals to give the current healthcare system a major facelift. Former Vice President Joe Biden endorses a public option and bolstering the Affordable Care Act, while Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are stumping for a Medicare for All-type system that would terminate private insurance.

The debate itself is a “good example of the fact that the status quo needs to change,” Tom Richards, global strategy and business development leader at Cigna, told Healthcare Dive.

Many healthcare tech startups have configured their products to be compatible within multiple platforms or companies, including myriad providers, Medicare, insurance on the ACA exchanges or employer-based coverage, so the payer platform doesn’t matter as much to them — or their margins.

“So long as innovation is maintained, I think it could go either way,” Pranay Kapadia, CEO of voice-enabled digital assistant startup Notable, said.

But executives, even on the startup side, seemed leery about the uncertainty Medicare for All would inject into the system.

“At the end of the day, the government is already unable to fully fund its obligations, from Social Security, to Medicare, to Medicaid,” Ali Diab, CEO of employer-sponsored insurance startup Collective Health, said.

“Unless someone proposes a means to actually fund it that’s credible, I just don’t see a way for the government to take on more of the financial burden,” he said, though he clarified he didn’t have an opinion on the politics either way.

Moving to some form of a nationalized healthcare system could drag down profit margins across the industry (especially for payers). Cost estimates for the plans vary in the tens of trillions, from Sanders’ $33 trillion to Warren’s $52 trillion, both spread out over a decade.

Democratic backers say Medicare for All will drive down overall costs in the long run, despite hiking federal spending. Warren, who released her plan Friday, pledged there would be no middle-class tax increases and that Americans’ pocketbooks would be helped overall due to the elimination of premiums and other out-of-pocket costs.

But industry isn’t so sure the government could implement such a sweeping plan, even if it wanted to.

“I just don’t see the legislators getting their act together to make this happen and, frankly, I don’t want to wait for them,” Marijka Grey, executive leader for transformation implementation at 150-hospital CommonSpirit Health, said.

At HLTH, Trump administration officials kept up their drumbeat of criticism of the idea.

It would “hand the reins to government bureaucrats to fix all our problems” and is marked by an “unwarranted confidence in government central planners,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said, while White House policy official and ex-pharma lobbyist Joe Grogan said Democrats “cannot accept no one is smart enough to design a healthcare system for all Americans.”

Few Democrats have released comprehensive healthcare proposals, though 11 of the remaining 16 candidates support some version of single-payer healthcare.

“Quite frankly, branding-wise it’s not horrible,” Adam Boehler, the former head of CMS’ innovation center, said. “In my opinion, it’s the content versus the brand in terms of whether something will work or not.”​

 

 

 

 

Healthcare delivery is moving “up and out”

Posted on by • Posted in Centers of Excellence, Cost Management, Cost Reduction, Health Insurance Industry, Health System, Hospital Bankruptcy, Hospital Industry, Service Line Rationalization, Strategy • Leave a comment

https://mailchi.mp/699634d842fa/the-weekly-gist-november-1-2019?e=d1e747d2d8

 

Our graphic this week captures a phenomenon that we’ve observed in our strategy work with regional, “super-regional” and national health systems. We call it the “up and out” phenomenon—healthcare delivery is increasingly being pulled up and out from local, siloed hospitals. The traditional hospital enterprise, operating in what we refer to below as the “fee-for-service zone”, has typically pursued a service approach that delivers all things to all people. Commonly, the combination of reimbursement incentives and health system governance structures has encouraged hospital executives to prioritize facility profitability over system performance.

One important source of value creation for regional systems is service line rationalization—essentially, consolidating key services in one facility rather than performing duplicative services in every hospital. Centralizing open heart surgery, for example, in one “center of excellence” in a region often results in both lower cost and higher quality, thanks to clinical and operational scale economies. But the economies of scale don’t necessarily run out at the regional level—for some high-end specialty services (transplants, for example) it makes sense to consolidate at a super-regional or national level. For a better outcome and lower price, consumers will be increasingly willing to travel to receive the best value care.

Meanwhile, many services currently performed in the hospital can be more efficiently performed in non-hospital settings and should be distributed across the market in ways that are more convenient and accessible for patients. Traditional hospital economics make the “inpatient-to-outpatient shift” problematic, but as price and access become important consumer engagement levers, there’s little use fighting that shift. Indeed, the logical setting for much care delivery is in the patient’s home itself. This puts systems in the position of pushing care delivery to the hyper-local level, a strategy that can be powered by digital medicine delivered at a national level. All of this raises an important question for the regional health system: as hands-on care is increasingly pulled “up” to the national level (centers of excellence) and pushed “out” to the community setting (home-based care), and as national providers of digital health services can deliver services to anywhere, from anywhere, what is the value of the regional system? We’re working with a number of members to better understand and prepare for this new operating model.

 

Elizabeth Warren’s $20.5 Trillion Plan to Fund Medicare for All

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Essential Health Benefits, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Insurance Industry, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Medicare, Medicare for All, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pharmaceutical Industry, Preexisting Conditions, Underinsured, Uninsured • Leave a comment

https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2019/11/01/Elizabeth-Warren-s-205-Trillion-Plan-Fund-Medicare-All

Image result for Medicare for All

Elizabeth Warren on Friday detailed how she intends to pay for Medicare for All without raising costs for middle-class households. The senator from Massachusetts said her plan will cover everyone in the country without raising overall spending, “while putting $11 trillion back in the pockets of the American people by eliminating premiums and virtually eliminating out-of-pocket costs.”

Warren’s plan relies in large part on redirecting existing spending toward a universal, federal health care system, while adding new revenues from taxes on the wealthy, the financial sector and large corporations. “We can generate almost half of what we need to cover Medicare for All just by asking employers to pay slightly less than what they are projected to pay today, and through existing taxes,” Warren said.

Some key details from the Warren plan:

Much lower cost estimate: Warren starts with the Urban Institute’s estimate that the federal government would need $34 trillion more over 10 years to pay for Medicare for All, but she slices that number dramatically — down to $20.5 trillion — by using existing federal and state spending on programs including Medicaid to fund a portion of her proposal, along with larger assumed savings produced by a streamlined system paying lower rates to hospitals, doctors and other health care providers.

Total health care spending stays about the same: Warren projects about $52 trillion in national health care spending over 10 years, close to estimates for the existing system, despite covering more people and offering more generous benefits, including long-term care, audio, vision and dental benefits. Applying Medicare payment levels across the health care system is projected to produce substantial savings that would be used to finance the expanded size and scope of the plan.

Heavy reliance on employer funding: The employer contribution to Medicare for All is pegged at $8.8 trillion, with employers required to contribute to the federal government 98% of what they would pay in employee premiums. Businesses with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt.

Public spending continues: State and local governments would be still on the hook for the $6 trillion they currently spend on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and public employee premiums.

New taxes on the wealthy: Warren proposes a new 3% tax on household wealth over $1 billion — and that’s on top of her proposed wealth tax, which calls for a separate 3% tax on wealth over $1 billion (and a 2% tax on wealth between $50 million and $1 billion). Combined with an annual capital gains tax on the top 1% of households, her proposal projects that the new health-care-focused wealth taxes would produce $3 trillion.

Taxes on business and finance: Warren says she can raise $3.8 trillion through “targeted” taxes on big business and financial transactions, including a financial transaction tax of .01% on the sale of stocks, bonds and derivatives.

Reduced tax evasion: Cracking down on tax evasion is projected to bring in $2.3 trillion. “The federal government has a nearly 15% ‘tax gap’ between what it collects in taxes what is actually owed because of systematic under-enforcement of our tax laws, tax evasion, and fraud,” Warren said. “By investing in stronger enforcement and adopting best practices on tax reporting, withholding, and filing, experts predict that we can close the tax gap by a third.”

Revenue increase from higher take-home pay: Employees would no longer pay premiums for health insurance, providing a pay hike and higher tax revenues, estimated to total $1.4 trillion.

Abolishing the Overseas Contingency Operations fund: Warren is calling for reduced military spending, with a focus on what some call the “slush fund” that covers the cost of overseas military operations. Eliminating this off-budget spending is projected to save $800 billion.

Immigration reform: Expanded legal immigration would bring in $400 billion in revenue as more incomes are subject to taxes, Warren says.

A record tax cut? Once the new revenues and cost savings are added up, Warren says her plan will deliver what amounts to an historic tax cut. “No middle class tax increases. $11 trillion in household expenses back in the pockets of American families. That’s substantially larger than the largest tax cut in American history.”

Warren won plaudits from some analysts and policy wonks for releasing a plan, but the details she laid out are also being picked apart by critics and rivals, with some experts already expressing doubts about her assumptions and numbers. Here’s some of the reaction:

Congratulations from a conservative: “Kudos to Senator Warren for actually releasing a plan,” said Scott Greenberg, formerly an analyst with the right-leaning Tax Foundation. “There are a lot of things in here that will draw attacks from the left and from the right, and it might have been politically easier not to release it at all. But Warren has stuck by her commitment to explain her proposals.”

Criticism from a key rival: “The mathematical gymnastics in this plan are all geared towards hiding a simple truth from voters: it’s impossible to pay for Medicare for All without middle class tax increases,”  said Kate Bedingfield, deputy campaign manager for Joe Biden. Bedingfield argued that employees would end up paying the tax on employers.

Dire warnings from the White House: “It is the middle class who would have to pay the extra $100 billion or more to finance this kind of socialist government takeover of health care,” said Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s top economic adviser. “It would have a catastrophic effect on the economy and all these numbers that we’re seeing, all these numbers, on incomes per household, on wage increases, on jobs, all these numbers would literally evaporate and by the by, so would the stock market.”

Tax vs. premium: Warren’s plan will likely kick off a debate about the difference between taxes and health care premiums, and whether that difference matters, says William Gale of the Brookings Institution. “Does [the Warren plan] raise ‘taxes’ on the middle class?,” Gale asked Friday. “Short answer — it does not raise ‘burdens’ on the middle class.”

Cost reduction is crucial: “The key to Warren’s plan for financing Medicare for all is aggressively constraining prices paid to hospitals, physicians, and drug companies. We’d still have the most expensive health system in the world, but it would be less expensive than it is now,” said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Warren’s plan to aggressively constrain health care prices under Medicare for all would be quite disruptive. On the other hand, every other developed country has managed to figure it out, so we know it’s possible.”

And the battle is ultimately political: “In laying out the specifics of her Medicare for all plan, Warren’s challenge is more about politics than arithmetic,” Levitt continued. “She is taking on the wealthy, corporations, and pretty much every part of the health care and insurance industries. Those are some powerful enemies.”

So don’t expect major legislation soon: “Experts will argue for months whether [Warren is] being too optimistic — whether her cost estimates are too low and her revenue estimates too high, whether we can really do this without middle-class tax hikes,” said economist Paul Krugman. “You might say that time will tell, but it probably won’t: Even if Warren becomes president, and Dems take the Senate too, it’s very unlikely that Medicare for all will happen any time soon.”

 

 

Adventist, St. Joseph merger rejected by California regulators

Posted on by • Posted in Antitrust, Consumer Protection, Dept of Justice (DOJ), Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Mergers & Acquisitions, Monopoly • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-transactions-and-valuation/adventist-st-joseph-merger-rejected-by-california-regulators.html

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The California Department of Justice denied a proposed merger between nonprofits Adventist Health System/West and St. Joseph Health System Oct. 31, stating it’s not in the public’s interest.

The transaction would increase healthcare costs and possibly limit healthcare access in Northern California, the department determined.

In June 2018, Roseville, Calif.-based Adventist and Irvine, Calif.-based St. Joseph requested to form a joint operating company to integrate 10 select facilities in Northern California. At the time, the systems said their integration would improve healthcare access, especially for vulnerable and underserved patients. 

Sean McCluskie, chief deputy to California’s attorney general, disagreed with those predictions.

“The California Department of Justice is responsible for ensuring that any proposed sale or transfer of a nonprofit health facility protects the health and safety interests of the surrounding community. After careful review, we found this proposal falls short of protecting consumers,” he said.

In a joint statement to Becker’s, Adventist and St. Joseph expressed disappointment about the department’s decision.

“Our intent has always been to better serve our communities, increase access to services, and create a stronger safety net for families in Northern California,” they said. “At this time, our organizations will need to take a step back and determine implications of this decision. The well-being of our communities remains our top priority.”

 

Phoenix hospital CEO gets $85K raise despite criticism from board members

Posted on by • Posted in Board, CEO, Executive Bonus, Executive Compensation, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Leadership, Operating Performance, Talent Management • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/phoenix-hospital-ceo-gets-85k-raise-despite-criticism-from-board-members.html

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The CEO of a public and nonprofit safety-net health system in Phoenix will get an $85,000 raise despite objections from two board members who questioned if the increase was excessive, according to the Arizona Republic.

Under a new five-year contract effective Oct. 25, Steve Purves, CEO of Valleywise Health, will see his annual salary rise to $685,000. Mr. Purves could also receive a discretionary $171,250 performance bonus and is eligible for a $68,500 retention bonus on Oct. 25, 2020. In 2020, Mr. Purves’ base pay will climb to $753,500, and by 2023 his base salary will be $872,191, according to the contract cited by the Arizona Republic.

The hospital’s governing board approved the contract in a 3-2 vote. The two board members who voted against the contract raised concerns about its length as well as the rise in salary and bonuses. They questioned whether a raise of that magnitude was appropriate, given that the hospital has faced federal penalties for five consecutive years over patient injuries and infections. They also noted Valleywise Health anticipates a $3 million deficit this fiscal year.

But the three board members who supported the contract said it was necessary to ensure Mr. Purves remained at Valleywise Health. They argued the package is similar to other CEOs at comparable health systems. They also praised Mr. Purves for steering Valleywise’s finances in a better direction, according to the Arizona Republic.

The final contract is $15,000 lower than one proposed in September. In that proposal, Mr. Purves would have received a $100,000 pay hike with a discretionary performance bonus of up to $175,000.

Read the full report here.

 

Attorneys’ Fees Doom Dignity Health’s $100 Million ERISA Deal

Posted on by • Posted in ERISA Church Plan Exemption, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Pension, Pension Funding, Pension Liability, Religious Affiliated Hospitals • Leave a comment

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/class-action/attorneys-fees-doom-dignity-healths-100-million-erisa-deal

Dignity Health’s $100 million class settlement with workers covered by its pension plan won’t get court approval until the parties rethink how the workers’ attorneys are paid, a federal judge in the Northern District of California ruled.

The deal is flawed because it contains a “kicker” clause allowing Dignity to keep any difference between the $6.15 million in attorneys’ fees authorized by the settlement and the amount of fees actually awarded by the court, Judge Jon S. Tigar said.

“Although the fact is not explicitly stated in the Settlement, if the Court awards less than $6.15 million in fees, Defendants keep the amount of the difference and those funds are not distributed to the class,” Tigar said. “The Court concludes that this arrangement, which potentially denies the class money that Defendants were willing to pay in settlement—with no apparent countervailing benefit to the class—renders the Settlement unreasonable.”

The proposed deal, which was slated to benefit more than 91,000 people, requires the hospital to put $50 million in its pension plan in 2020 and at least that much in 2021. Required contributions in the following three years will be based on recommendations from the plan’s actuaries, according to settlement papers filed in June.

Tiger also expressed concerns about Dignity’s agreement to make direct payments to certain plan participants. This has the potential to “shortchange or disproportionately favor these claims relative to classwide claims,” Tigar said.

Tiger withheld preliminary approval from the deal in an Oct. 29 order while giving the parties an opportunity to revise and try again.

Dignity Health is one of dozens of religiously affiliated hospitals that have been accused of wrongly treating their pension plans as “church plans” exempt from the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The lawsuits claim that hospitals misuse ERISA’s church plan exemption in order to underfund their plans by tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

The U.S. Supreme Court addressed ERISA’s church plan exemption in 2017, issuing a ruling that favored Dignity and other hospitals while leaving several questions open for further litigation.

The plan participants are represented by Keller Rohrback LLP and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. Dignity is represented by Manatt Phelps & Phillips LLP, Trucker Huss APC, and Nixon Peabody LLP.

The case is Rollins v. Dignity Health, N.D. Cal., No. 4:13-cv-01450-JST, 10/29/19.