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Physician-Owned Hospitals: The Answer for Better Care?

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https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/998353?form=fpf#vp_1

This discussion was recorded on November 16, 2023. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robert D. Glatter, MD: Welcome. I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today is Dr Brian Miller, a hospitalist with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a health policy expert, to discuss the current and renewed interest in physician-owned hospitals.

Welcome, Dr Miller. It’s a pleasure to have you join me today.

Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH: Thank you for having me.

History and Controversies Surrounding Physician-Owned Hospitals

Glatter: I want to start off by having you describe the history associated with the moratorium on new physician-owned hospitals in 2010 that’s related ultimately to the Affordable Care Act, but also, the current and renewed media interest in physician-owned hospitals that’s linked to recent congressional hearings last month.

Miller: Thank you. I should note that my views are my own and don’t represent those of Hopkins or the American Enterprise Institute, where I’m a nonresident fellow nor the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, of which I’m a Commissioner.

The story about physician-owned hospitals is an interesting one. Hospitals turned into health systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and physicians started to shift purely from an independent model into a more organized group practice or employed model. Physicians realized that they wanted an alternative operating arrangement. You want a choice of how you practice and what your employment is. And as community hospitals started to buy physicians and also establish their own physician groups de novo, physicians opened physician-owned hospitals.

Physician-owned hospitals fell into a couple of buckets. One is what we call community hospitals, or what the antitrust lawyers would call general acute care hospitals: those offering emergency room (ER) services, labor and delivery, primary care, general surgery — the whole regular gamut, except that some of the owners were physicians.

The other half of the marketplace ended up being specialty hospitals: those built around a specific medical specialty and series of procedures and chronic care. For example, cardiac hospitals often do CABG, TAVR, maybe abdominal aortic aneurysm (triple A) repairs, and they have cardiology clinics, cath labs, a cardiac intensive care unit (ICU), ER, etc. There were also orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, which were sort of like an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) plus several beds. Then there were general surgical specialty hospitals. At one point, there were some women’s health–focused specialty hospitals.

The hospital industry, of course, as you can understand, didn’t exactly like this. They had a series of concerns about what we would historically call cherry-picking or lemon-dropping of patients. They were worried that physician-owned facilities didn’t want to serve public payer patients, and there was a whole series of reports and investigations.

Around the time the Affordable Care Act passed, the hospital industry had many concerns about physician-owned specialty hospitals, and there was a moratorium as part of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. As part of the bargaining over the hospital industry support for the Affordable Care Act, they traded their support for, among other things, their number one priority, which is a statutory prohibition on new or expanded physician-owned hospitals from participating in Medicare. That included both physician-owned community hospitals and physician-owned specialty hospitals.

Glatter: I guess the main interest is that, when physicians have an ownership or a stake in the hospital, this is what the Stark laws obviously were aimed at. That was part of the impetus to prevent physicians from referring patients where they had an ownership stake. Certainly, hospitals can be owned by attorneys and nonprofit organizations, and certainly, ASCs can be owned by physicians. There is an ongoing issue in terms of physicians not being able to have an ownership stake. In terms of equity ownership, we know that certain other models allow this, but basically, it sounds like this is an issue with Medicare. That seems to be the crux of it, correct?

Miller: Yes. I would also add that it’s interesting when we look at other professions. When we look at lawyers, nonlawyers are actually not allowed to own an equity stake in a law practice. In many other professions, you either have corporate ownership or professional ownership, or the alternative is you have only professional ownership. I would say the hospital industry is one of the few areas where professional ownership not only is not allowed, but also is statutorily prohibited functionally through the Medicare program.

Unveiling the Dynamics of Hospital Ownership

Glatter: A recent study done by two PhDs looked at 2019 data on 20 of the most expensive diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). It examined the cost savings, and we’re talking over $1 billion in expenditures when you look at the data from general acute care hospitals vs physician-owned hospitals. This is what appears to me to be a key driver of the push to loosen restrictions on physician-owned hospitals. Isn’t that correct?

Miller: I would say that’s one of many components. There’s more history to this issue. I remember sitting at a think tank talking to someone several years ago about hospital consolidation as an issue. We went through the usual levers that us policy wonks go through. We talked about antitrust enforcement, certificate of need, rising hospital costs from consolidation, lower quality (or at least no quality gains, as shown by a New England Journal of Medicine study), and decrements in patient experience that result from the diseconomies of scale. They sort of pooh-poohed many of the policy ideas. They basically said that there was no hope for hospital consolidation as an issue.

Well, what about physician ownership? I started with my research team to comb through the literature and found a variety of studies — some of which were sort of entertaining, because they’d do things like study physician-owned specialty hospitals, nonprofit-owned specialty hospitals, and for-profit specialty hospitals and compare them with nonprofit or for-profit community hospitals, and then say physician-owned hospitals that were specialty were bad.

They mixed ownership and service markets right there in so many ways, I’m not sure where to start. My team did a systematic review of around 30 years of research, looking at the evidence base in this space. We found a couple of things.

We found that physician-owned community hospitals did not have a cost or quality difference, meaning that there was no definitive evidence that the physician-owned community hospitals were cheaper based on historical evidence, which was very old. That means there’s not specific harm from them. When you permit market entry for community hospitals, that promotes competition, which results in lower prices and higher quality.

Then we also looked at the specialty hospital markets — surgical specialty hospitals, orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, and cardiac hospitals. We noted for cardiac hospitals, there wasn’t clear evidence about cost savings, but there was definitive evidence of higher quality, from things like 30-day mortality for significant procedures like treatment of acute MI, triple A repair, stuff like that.

For orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, we noted lower costs and higher quality, which again fits with operationally what we would know. If you have a facility that’s doing 20 total hips a day, you’re creating a focused factory. Just like if you think about it for interventional cardiology, your boards have a minimum number of procedures that you have to do to stay certified because we know about the volume-quality relationship.

Then we looked at general surgical specialty hospitals. There wasn’t enough evidence to make a conclusive thought about costs, and there was a clear trend toward higher quality. I would say this recent study is important, but there is a whole bunch of other literature out there, too.

Exploring the Scope of Emergency Care in Physician-Owned Hospitals

Glatter: Certainly, your colleague Wang from Johns Hopkins has done important research in this sector. The paper, “Reconsidering the Ban on Physician-Owned Hospitals to Combat Consolidation,” by you and several colleagues, mentions and highlights the issues that you just described. I understand that it’s going to be published in the N.Y.U. Journal of Legislation and Public Policy.

One thing I want to bring up — and this is an important issue — is that the risk for patients has been talked about by the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals, in terms of limited or no emergency services at such physician-owned hospitals and having to call 911 when patients need emergent care or stabilization. That’s been the rebuttal, along with an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report from 2008. Almost, I guess, three quarters of the patients that needed emergent care got this at publicly funded hospitals.

Miller: I’m familiar with the argument about emergency care. If you actually go and look at it, it differs by specialty market. Physician-owned community hospitals have ERs because that’s how they get their business. If you are running a hospital medicine floor, a general surgical specialty floor, you have a labor delivery unit, a primary care clinic, and a cardiology clinic. You have all the things that all the other hospitals have. The physician-owned community hospitals almost uniformly have an ER.

When you look at the physician-owned specialty hospitals, it’s a little more granular. If you look at the cardiac hospitals, they have ERs. They also have cardiac ICUs, operating rooms, etc. The area where the hospital industry had concerns — which I think is valid to point out — is that physician-owned orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals don’t have ERs. But this makes sense because of what that hospital functionally is: a factory for whatever the scope of procedures is, be it joint replacements or shoulder arthroscopy. The orthopedic surgical specialty hospital is like an ASC plus several hospital beds. Many of those did not have ERs because clinically it didn’t make sense.

What’s interesting, though, is that the hospital industry also operates specialty hospitals. If you go into many of the large systems, they have cardiac specialty hospitals and cancer specialty hospitals. I would say that some of them have ERs, as they appropriately should, and some of those specialty hospitals do not. They might have a community hospital down the street that’s part of that health system that has an ER, but some of the specialty hospitals don’t necessarily have a dedicated ER.

I agree, that’s a valid concern. I would say, though, the question is, what are the scope of services in that hospital? Is an ER required? Community hospitals should have ERs. It makes sense also for a cardiac hospital to have one. If you’re running a total joint replacement factory, it might not make clinical sense.

Glatter: The patients who are treated at that hospital, if they do have emergent conditions, need to have board-certified emergency physicians treating them, in my view because I’m an ER physician. Having surgeons that are not emergency physicians staff a department at a specialty orthopedic hospital or, say, a cancer hospital is not acceptable from my standpoint. That’s my opinion and recommendation, coming from emergency medicine.

Miller: I would say that anesthesiologists are actually highly qualified in critical care. The question is about clinical decompensation; if you’re doing a procedure, you have an anesthesiologist right there who is capable of critical care. The function of the ER is to either serve as a window into the hospital for patient volume or to serve as a referral for emergent complaints.

Glatter: An anesthesiologist — I’ll take issue with that — does not have the training of an emergency physician in terms of scope of practice.

Miller: My anesthesiology colleagues would probably disagree for managing an emergency during an operating room case.

Glatter: Fair enough, but I think in the general sense. The other issue is that, in terms of emergent responses to patients that decompensate, when you have to transfer a patient, that violates Medicare requirements. How is that even a valid issue or argument if you’re going to have to transfer a patient from your specialty hospital? That happens. Again, I know that you’re saying these hospitals are completely independent and can function, stabilize patients, and treat emergencies, but that’s not the reality across the country, in my opinion.

Miller: I don’t think that’s the case for the physician-owned specialty cardiac hospitals, for starters. Many of those have ICUs in addition to operating rooms as a matter of routine in addition to ERs. I don’t think that’s the case for physician-owned community hospitals, which have ERs, ICUs, medicine floors, and surgical floors. Physician-owned community hospitals are around half the market. Of that remaining market, a significant percentage are cardiac hospitals. If you’re taking an issue with orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals, that’s a clinical operational question that can and should be answered.

I’d also posit that the nonprofit and for-profit hospital industries also operate specialty hospitals. Any of these questions, we shouldn’t just be asking about physician-owned facilities; we should be asking about them across ownership types, because we’re talking about scope of service and quality and safety. The ownership in that case doesn’t matter. The broader question is, are orthopedic surgical specialty hospitals owned by physicians, tax-exempt hospitals, or tax-paying hospitals? Is that a valid clinical business model? Is it safe? Does it meet Medicare conditions of participation? I would say that’s what that question is, because other ownership models do operate those facilities.

Glatter: You make some valid points, and I do agree on some of them. I think that, ultimately, these models of care, and certainly cost and quality, are issues. Again, it goes back to being able, in my opinion, to provide emergent care, which seems to me a very important issue.

Miller: I agree that providing emergent care is an issue. It’s an issue in any site of care. The hospital industry posits that all hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs) have emergent care. I can tell you, having worked in HOPDs (I’ve trained in them during residency), the response if something emergent happens is to either call 911 or wheel the patient down to the ER in a wheelchair or stretcher. I think that these hospital claims about emergency care coverage —these are important questions, but we should be asking them across all clinical settings and say what is the appropriate scope of care provided? What is the appropriate level of acuity and ability to provide emergent or critical care? That’s an important question regardless of ownership model across the entire industry.

Deeper Dive Into Data on Physician-Owned Hospitals

Glatter: We need to really focus on that. I’ll agree with you on that.

There was a March 2023 report from Dobson | DaVanzo. It showed that physician-owned hospitals had lower Medicaid, dual-eligible, and uncompensated care and charity care discharges than full-service acute care hospitals. Physician-owned hospitals had less than half the proportion of Medicaid discharges compared with non–physician-owned hospitals. They were also less likely to care for dual-eligible patients overall compared with non–physician-owned hospitals.

In addition, when COVID hit, the physician-owned hospitals overall — and again, there may be exceptions — were not equipped to handle these patient surges in the acute setting of a public health emergency. There was a hospital in Texas that did pivot that I’m aware of — Renaissance Hospital, which ramped up a long-term care facility to become a COVID hospital — but I think that’s the exception. I think this report raises some valid concerns; I’ll let you rebut that.

Miller: A couple of things. One, I am not aware that there’s any clear market evidence or a systematic study that shows that physician-owned hospitals had trouble responding to COVID. I don’t think that assertion has been proven. The study was funded by the hospital industry. First of all, it was not a peer-reviewed study; it was funded by an industry that paid a consulting firm. It doesn’t mean that we still shouldn’t read it, but that brings bias into question. The joke in Washington is, pick your favorite statistician or economist, and they can say what you want and have a battle of economists and statisticians.

For example, in that study, they didn’t include the entire ownership universe of physician-owned hospitals. If we go to the peer-reviewed literature, there’s a great 2015 BMJ paper showing that the Medicaid payer mix is actually the same between physician-owned hospitals vs not. The mix of patients by ethnicity — for example, think about African American patients — was the same. I would be more inclined to believe the peer-reviewed literature in BMJ as opposed to an industry-funded study that was not peer-reviewed and not independent and has methodological questions.

Glatter: Those data are 8 years old, so I’d like to see more recent data. It would be interesting, just as a follow-up to that, to see where the needle has moved — if it has, for that matter — in terms of Medicaid patients that you’re referring to.

Miller: I tend to be skeptical of all industry research, regardless of who published it, because they have an economic incentive. If they’re selecting certain age groups or excluding certain hospitals, that makes you wonder about the validity of the study. Your job as an industry-funded researcher is that, essentially, you’re being paid to look for an answer. It’s not necessarily an honest evaluation of the data.

Glatter: I want to bring up another point about the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) and the data on how physician-owned hospitals compared with acute care hospitals that are non–physician-owned and have you comment on that. The Dobson | DaVanzo study called into question that physician-owned hospitals treat fewer patients who are dual-eligible, which we know.

Miller: I don’t think we do know that.

Glatter: There are data that point to that, again, looking at the studies.

Miller: I’m saying that’s a single study funded by industry as opposed to an independent, academic, peer-reviewed literature paper. That would be like saying, during the debate of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), that you should read the pharmaceutical industries research but take any of it at pure face value as factual. Yes, we should read it. Yes, we should evaluate it on its own merits. I think, again, appropriately, you need to be concerned when people have an economic incentive.

The question about the HRRP I’m going to take a little broader, because I think that program is unfair to the industry overall. There are many factors that drive hospital readmission. Whether Mrs Smith went home and ate potato chips and then took her Lasix, that’s very much outside of the hospital industry’s control, and there’s some evidence that the HRRP increases mortality in some patient populations.

In terms of a quality metric, it’s unfair to the industry. I think we took an operating process, internal metric for the hospital industry, turned it into a quality metric, and attached it to a financial bonus, which is an inappropriate policy decision.

Rethinking Ownership Models and Empowering Clinicians

Glatter: I agree with you on that. One thing I do want to bring up is that whether the physician-owned hospitals are subject to many of the quality measures that full-service, acute care hospitals are. That really is, I think, a broader context.

Miller: Fifty-five percent of physician-owned hospitals are full-service community hospitals, so I would say at least half the market is 100% subject to that.

Glatter: If only 50% are, that’s already an issue.

Miller: Cardiac specialty hospitals — which, as I said, nonprofit and for-profit hospital chains also operate — are also subject to the appropriate quality measures, readmissions, etc. Just because we don’t necessarily have the best quality measurement in the system in the country, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow care specialization. As I’d point out, if we’re concerned about specialty hospitals, the concern shouldn’t just be about physician-owned specialty hospitals; it should be about specialty hospitals by and large. Many health systems run cardiac specialty hospitals, cancer specialty hospitals, and orthopedic specialty hospitals. If we’re going to have a discussion about concerns there, it should be about the entire industry of specialty hospitals.

I think specialty hospitals serve an important role in society, allowing for specialization and exploiting in a positive way the volume-quality relationship. Whether those are owned by a for-profit publicly traded company, a tax-exempt facility, or physicians, I think that is an important way to have innovation and care delivery because frankly, we haven’t had much innovation in care delivery. Much of what we do in terms of how we practice clinically hasn’t really changed in the 50 years since my late father graduated from medical school. We still have rounds, we’re still taking notes, we’re still operating in the same way. Many processes are manual. We don’t have the mass production and mass customization of care that we need.

When you have a focused factory, it allows you to design care in a way that drives up quality, not just for the average patient but also the patients at the tail ends, because you have time to focus on that specific service line and that specific patient population.

Physician-owned community hospitals offer an important opportunity for a different employment model. I remember going to the dermatologist and the dermatologist was depressed, shuffling around the room, sad, and I asked him why. He said he didn’t really like his employer, and I said, “Why don’t you pick another one?” He’s like, “There are only two large health systems I can work for. They all have the same clinical practice environment and functionally the same value.”

Physicians are increasingly burned out. They face monopsony power in who purchases their labor. They have little control. They don’t want to go through five committees, seven administrators, and attend 25 meetings just to change a single small process in clinical operations. If you’re an owner operator, you have a much better ability to do it.

Frankly, when many facilities do well now, when they do well clinically and do well financially, who benefits? The hospital administration and the hospital executives. The doctors aren’t benefiting. The nurses aren’t benefiting. The CNA is not benefiting. The secretary is not benefiting. The custodian is not benefiting. Shouldn’t the workers have a right to own and operate the business and do well when the business does well serving the community? That puts me in the weird space of agreeing with both conservatives and progressives.

Glatter: I agree with you. I think an ownership stake is always attractive. It helps with retention of employed persons. There’s no question that, when they have a stake, when they have skin in the game, they feel more empowered. I will not argue with you about that.

Miller: We don’t have business models where workers have that option in healthcare. Like the National Academy of Medicine said, one of the key drivers of burnout is the externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice, and the current business operating models guarantee an externalization of the locus of control over clinical practice.

If you actually look at the recent American Medical Association (AMA) meeting, there was a resolution to ban the corporate practice of medicine. They wanted to go more toward the legal professions model where only physicians can own and operate care delivery.

Glatter: Well, I think the shift is certainly something that the AMA would like and physicians collectively would agree with. Having a better lifestyle and being able to have control are factors in burnout.

Miller: It’s not just doctors. I think nurses want a better lifestyle. The nurses are treated as interchangeable lines on a spreadsheet. The nurses are an integral part of our clinical team. Why don’t we work together as a clinical unit to build a better delivery system? What better way to do that than to have clinicians in charge of it, right?

My favorite bakery that’s about 30 minutes away is owned by a baker. It is not owned by a large tax-exempt corporation. It’s owned by an owner operator who takes pride in their work. I think that is something that the profession would do well to return to. When I was a resident, one of my colleagues was already planning their retirement. That’s how depressed they were.

I went into medicine to actually care for patients. I think that we can make the world a better place for our patients. What that means is not only treating them with drugs and devices, but also creating a delivery system where they don’t have to wander from lobby to lobby in a 200,000 square-foot facility, wait in line for hours on end, get bills 6 months later, and fill out endless paper forms over and over again.

All of these basic processes in healthcare delivery that are broken could have and should have been fixed — and have been fixed in almost every other industry. I had to replace one of my car tires because I had a flat tire. The local tire shop has an app, and it sends me SMS text messages telling me when my appointment is and when my car is ready. We have solved all of these problems in many other businesses.

We have not solved them in healthcare delivery because, one, we have massive monopolies that are raising prices, have lower quality, and deliver a crappy patient experience, and we have also subjugated the clinical worker into a corporate automaton. We are functionally drones. We don’t have the agency and the authority to improve clinical operations anymore. It’s really depressing, and we should have that option again.

I trust my doctor. I trust the nurses that I work with, and I would like them to help make clinical decisions in a financially responsible and a sensible operational manner. We need to empower our workforce in order to do that so we can recapture the value of what it means to be a clinician again.

The current model of corporate employment: massive scale, more administrators, more processes, more emails, more meetings, more PowerPoint decks, more federal subsidies. The hospital industry has choices. It can improve clinical operations. It can show up in Washington and lobby for increased subsidies. It can invest in the market and not pay taxes for the tax-exempt facilities. Obviously, it makes the logical choices as an economic actor to show up, lobby for increased subsidies, and then also invest in the stock market.

Improving clinical operations is hard. It hasn’t happened. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private community hospital industry has had flat labor productivity growth, on average, for the past 25 years, and for some years it even declined. This is totally atypical across the economy.

We have failed our clinicians, and most importantly, we have failed our patients. I’ve been sick. My relatives have been sick, waiting hours, not able to get appointments, and redoing forms. It’s a total disaster. It’s time and reasonable to try an alternative ownership and operating model. There are obviously problems. The problems can and should be addressed, but it doesn’t mean that we should have a statutory prohibition on professionals owning and operating their own business.

Glatter: There was a report that $500 million was saved by limiting or banning or putting a moratorium on physician-owned hospitals by the Congressional Budget Office.

Miller: Yes, I’m very aware of those data. I’d say that the CBO also is off by 50% on the estimation of the implementation of the Part D program. They overestimated the Affordable Care Act market enrollment by over 10 million people — again, around 50%. They also estimated that the CMS Innovation Center initially would be a savings. Now they’ve re-estimated it as a 10-year expenditure and it has actually cost the taxpayers money.

The CBO is not transparent about what its assumptions are or its analysis and methods. As a researcher, we have to publish our information. It has to go through peer review. I want to know what goes into that $500 million figure — what the assumptions are and what the model is. It’s hard to comment without knowing how they came up with it.

Glatter: The points you make are very valid. Physicians and nurses want a better lifestyle.

Miller: It’s not even a better lifestyle. It’s about having a say in how clinical operations work and helping make them better. We want the delivery system to work better. This is an opportunity for us to do so.

Glatter: That translates into technology: obviously, generative artificial intelligence (AI) coming into the forefront, as we know, and changing care delivery models as you’re referring to, which is going to happen. It’s going to be a slow process. I think that the evolution is happening and will happen, as you accurately described.

Miller: The other thing that’s different now vs 20 years ago is that managed care is here, there, and everywhere, as Dr Seuss would say. You have utilization review and prior authorization, which I’ve experienced as a patient and a physician, and boy, is it not a fun process. There’s a large amount of friction that needs to be improved. If we’re worried about induced demand or inappropriate utilization, we have managed care right there to help police bad behavior.

Reforming Healthcare Systems and Restoring Patient-Centric Focus

Glatter: If you were to come up with, say, three bullet points of how we can work our way out of this current morass of where our healthcare systems exist, where do you see the solutions or how can we make and effect change?

Miller: I’d say there are a couple of things. One is, let business models compete fairly on an equal playing field. Let the physician-owned hospital compete with the tax-exempt hospital and the nonprofit hospital. Put them on an equal playing field. We have things like 340B, which favors tax-exempt hospitals. For-profit or tax-paying hospitals are not able to participate in that. That doesn’t make any sense just from a public policy perspective. Tax-paying hospitals and physician-owned hospitals pay taxes on investments, but tax-exempt hospitals don’t. I think, in public policy, we need to equalize the playing field between business models. Let the best business model win.

The other thing we need to do is to encourage the adoption of technology. The physician will eventually be an arbiter of tech-driven or AI-driven tools. In fact, at some point, the standard of care might be to use those tools. Not using those tools would be seen as negligence. If you think about placing a jugular or central venous catheter, to not use ultrasound would be considered insane. Thirty years ago, to use ultrasound would be considered novel. I think technology and AI will get us to that point of helping make care more efficient and more customized.

Those are the two biggest interventions, I would say. Third, every time we have a conversation in public policy, we need to remember what it is to be a patient. The decision should be driven not around any one industry’s profitability, but what it is to be a patient and how we can make that experience less burdensome, less expensive, or in plain English, suck less.

Glatter: Safety net hospitals and critical access hospitals are part of this discussion that, yes, we want everything to, in an ideal world, function more efficiently and effectively, with less cost and less red tape. The safety net of our nation is struggling.

Miller: I 100% agree. The Cook County hospitals of the world are deserving of our support and, frankly, our gratitude. Facilities like that have huge burdens of patients with Medicaid. We also still have millions of uninsured patients. The neighborhoods that they serve are also poorer. I think facilities like that are deserving of public support.

I also think we need to clearly define what those hospitals are. One of the challenges I’ve realized as I waded into this space is that market definitions of what a service market is for a hospital, its specialty type or what a safety net hospital is need to be more clearly defined because those facilities 100% are deserving of our support. We just need to be clear about what they are.

Regarding critical access hospitals, when you practice in a rural area, you have to think differently about care delivery. I’d say many of the rural systems are highly creative in how they structure clinical operations. Before the public health emergency, during the COVID pandemic, when we had a massive change in telehealth, rural hospitals were using — within the very narrow confines — as much telehealth as they could and should.

Rural hospitals also make greater use of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs). For many of the specialty services, I remember, your first call was an NP or a PA because the physician was downstairs doing procedures. They’d come up and assess the patient before the procedure, but most of your consult questions were answered by the NP or PA. I’m not saying that’s the model we should use nationwide, but that rural systems are highly innovative and creative; they’re deserving of our time, attention, and support, and frankly, we can learn from them.

Glatter: I want to thank you for your time and your expertise in this area. We’ll see how the congressional hearings affect the industry as a whole, how the needle moves, and whether the ban or moratorium on physician-owned hospitals continues to exist going forward.

Miller: I appreciate you having me. The hospital industry is one of the most important industries for health care. This is a time of inflection, right? We need to go back to the value of what it means to be a clinician and serve patients. Hospitals need to reorient themselves around that core concern. How do we help support clinicians — doctors, nurses, pharmacists, whomever it is — in serving patients? Hospitals have become too corporate, so I think that this is an expected pushback.

Glatter: Again, I want to thank you for your time. This was a very important discussion. Thank you for your expertise.

Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series.

Brian J. Miller, MD, MBA, MPH, is a hospitalist and an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2014 – 2017, Dr Miller worked at four federal regulatory agencies: Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

Lawmakers urge HHS to fine drugmakers restricting 340B drug discounts

Posted on by • Posted in Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Medicare 340B Drug Discount Program, Office of Inspector General (IG), Pharmaceutical Industry, Vulnerable Populations • Leave a comment
https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/lawmakers-urge-hhs-to-fine-drugmakers-restricting-340b-drug-discounts/627516/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202022-07-19%20Healthcare%20Dive%20%5Bissue:43189%5D&utm_term=Healthcare%20Dive

Dive Brief:

  • More than 180 members of the House of Representatives are urging the Biden administration to crack down on drugmakers restricting drug discounts in the 340B program.
  • Enforcement actions should include fines, the letter from a bipartisan group of House members to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and other administration officials said.
  • Currently, 18 drug manufacturers are limiting 340B discounts dispensed through pharmacies that contract with 340B providers, according to the letter.

Dive Insight:

The 340B program requires drugmakers to charge hospitals only the statutory ceiling prices for eligible outpatient drugs. The goal of the three-decade-old program is to have savings flow into care for low-income patients and underserved communities. But critics — notably, drugmakers and some lawmakers — argue the program doesn’t have enough oversight, as hospitals don’t need to account for what they do with any savings.

Drug manufacturers began imposing restrictions on 340B discounts as early as summer 2020, sparking legal challenges from regulators. The HHS sent nine warning letters to pharmaceutical companies, referring seven of them to the Office of the Inspector General for investigation and potential enforcement.

However, eight months later, the OIG has yet to take enforcement action, the new letter from 181 House members reads.

The letter asks the OIG to finish its ongoing review of seven drug manufacturers for potential noncompliance with federal law on 340B discounts “as soon as possible.”

The law allows the OIG to impose fines up to $6,000 per drug claim on companies that intentionally overcharge 340B providers, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the program.

Regulators should begin imposing civil monetary penalties against pharmaceutical companies found in violation, the congresspeople said.

The letter also argues that the Biden administration should pursue enforcement action against 11 drug companies restricting 340B pricing, which either haven’t received notice from the HHS that they’re in violation of law yet, or have received a notice but haven’t been referred to OIG for enforcement.

“Every day that drug manufacturers violate their obligation to provide these discounted drugs, vulnerable communities, federal grantees, and safety net health care providers are deprived of resources Congress intended to provide,” the letter reads.

A number of hospital associations came out in support of the letter, including the National Rural Health Association, the American Hospital Association, America’s Essential Hospitals and the National Association of Community Health Centers.

340B Health, which lobbies on behalf of hospitals in the 340B program, thanked the House members for the letter in a statement Monday, and reiterated calls for fines.

“HHS should impose steep financial penalties on all the companies that are ignoring their legal commitments to the health care safety net,” said Maureen Testoni, CEO of 340B Health, in a statement.

A survey of more than 500 hospitals by 340B Health released in May estimated that the annual financial impact from drug company restrictions has doubled since the end of 2021, costing hospitals millions of dollars per year.

Drugmakers that have imposed or announced restrictions on 340B discounts for drugs dispensed at community and specialty pharmacies include AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Pfizer.

The 340B discounts can range from 25% to 50% of the cost of the drugs.

I just got Fired!

Posted on by • Posted in Communication, Compliance, Cultural Fit, Culture, Disagreement, Divergence, Failure, Fired, Honesty, Human Resources, Integrity, Job Search, Job Security, Leadership Transition, Office of Inspector General (IG), Severance Compensation • Leave a comment

https://interimcfo.wordpress.com/2021/02/11/i-just-got-fired/

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‘

I went out on a social event with a hospital CFO. During the course of the day, it seemed that all I heard was griping about the CEO. Then I heard that the organization was ‘giving back’ most of the last year’s gains, how most of the leadership team were idiots, and on and on. Finally, I told my friend that I thought he was in burn-out and that if he did not do something to alleviate the stress he was bearing, things were not going to end well. A couple of weeks later, I received a call from my friend. The conversation started with, “You will not believe what just happened.” My answer was, “How many guesses do I get?”

In hindsight, it was easy to see this transition coming. I know. It has happened to me – more than once. The circumstances, emotions, and process leading up to a transition event are relatively consistent in my experience. People stop listening to you. You start feeling out of touch with the rest of the organization. Your relationships with peers begin to cool, especially the relationship with the boss. You learn that you are increasingly not invited to important meetings or summoned to participate in matters that are clearly within your scope. You begin to sense divergence of political and or philosophical views with the core leadership of the organization. Your boss and others start going around you to approach your staff directly.

These processes continue until you get invited to an unscheduled meeting where you learn that you are about to be freed up to seek other opportunities.

First, a disclaimer. I am assuming that the termination is not for cause, i.e., violation of policy, violation of the law, or behavior unbecoming. The majority of separations and terminations I am familiar with have little if anything to do with cause and occur primarily because of lack of fit or growing disagreement between the incumbent and their manager regarding the organization’s course. Sometimes, the incumbent’s area of responsibility is no longer meeting the needs of the organization. Too often, internal corporate politics are responsible for deals that started well souring. Sometimes, a transition follows an executive, usually but not always the CFO, digging in over their interpretation of the organization getting too close to crossing a compliance red line. Instead of greasing the squeaky wheel, the organization decides to address the problem by getting rid of the irritant. I have been in a situation more than once where I had to decide whether my integrity was for sale and what a fair price might be. In every case, I elected to avoid the disaster that has befallen executives that flew too close to the OIG’s flame, and in one case, it led to a separation from the organization.

One of my favorite Zig Ziglar quotes is, “Failure is an event; it is not a person.” Just because someone ends up in a transition does not mean by definition that they are a terrible person. Time and again, in these blogs, I have stipulated that for me to follow someone that was ‘bad’ in some way is extremely rare. In these articles, I address termination from the view of the ‘victim.’

I am speaking from experience writing this as I have been through an unplanned transition more than once. I know my problem; I get frustrated with politics, BS, sub-optimization, the toxicity of culture, and eventually lose my sense of humor or ability to eat crap without gagging. Not too long after I start telling people what I really think and, . . . . well, you know the rest of the story. What I believe is a growing risk of being an employee is why I decided to leave permanent employment and become a career Interim Executive Consultant. Regardless of the cause of a turnover event, it is gut-wrenching. Even if you sense it coming, it is no easier to bear. In a matter of a few minutes, you go from someone whose expertise and perspective are in high demand to someone that has no reason to get out of bed. The pain is increased exponentially by those that used to dote on you refusing to return phone calls or answer emails.

More than once, I have received a call from someone looking for help because their deal either has gone bad or is in the process of deterioriation. Invariably, a few weeks later, I get the call. Upon answering the phone, the conversation starts, “You aren’t going to believe what just happened to me!” My first thought is not again! It pains me almost as much to witness someone else go through a transition as it is to go through it yourself. As I said before, my response is, “How many guesses do I get?” I ask this question with a high degree of certainty that the answer is a forgone conclusion.


Sadly, people going through a transition process do not fully appreciate what they are facing, especially the first time. The first problem is the amount of time the executive is going to be unemployed. When this happened to me the first time in the ’80s, I was shocked when a mentor told me to expect a month for each $10,000 of pre-transition compensation. I could not believe this was possible, but I have seen it happen time after time. With the inflation that has occurred since then, a good rule of thumb is probably a month for each $20,000 of pre-transition compensation. Thinking back to my principle that the time to start planning for a transition is now, one of the things to be prepared for is up to a year of interruption in income unless you are fortunate enough to have a severance agreement.

Contact me to discuss any questions or observations you might have about these articles, leadership, transitions, or interim services. I might have an idea or two that might be valuable to you. An observation from my experience is that we need better leadership at every level in organizations. Some of my feedback comes from people who are demonstrating an interest in advancing their careers, and I am writing content to address those inquiries.

I encourage you to use the comment section at the bottom of each article to provide feedback and stimulate discussion. I welcome input and feedback that will help me to improve the quality and relevance of this work.

If you would like to discuss any of this content, provide private feedback or ask questions, you can reach me at ras2@me.com.

https://interimcfo.wordpress.com/

$6B fraud bust includes numerous telehealth schemes

Posted on by • Posted in Coronavirus, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Dept of Justice (DOJ), False Claims Act, Fraud and Abuse, Kickbacks, Money Laundering, Office of Inspector General (IG), Pandemic, Rev Cycle Management, Revenue Cycle, Telemedicine, Unnecessary Care • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/6b-fraud-bust-includes-numerous-telehealth-schemes/586220/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202020-10-01%20Healthcare%20Dive%20%5Bissue:29992%5D&utm_term=Healthcare%20Dive

Dive Brief:

  • Federal agencies have charged 345 people across the country, including more than 100 providers and four telehealth executives, with submitting more than $6 billion in fraudulent claims to payers. Of that, $4.5 billion was connected to telemedicine schemes and about $800 million each to substance abuse treatment and illegal opioid distribution.
  • More than 250 medical professionals had their federal healthcare billing privileges revoked for being involved in the scams, according to a statement released Wednesday.
  • The U.S. Department of Justice also said it is creating a new rapid response strike force to investigate fraud cases involving major providers that operate in multiple jurisdictions.

Dive Insight:

Telehealth fraud has increased significantly since 2016, the HHS Office of Inspector General said. As providers have quickly pivoted many services to virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic, attempts at fraud will likely follow.

One of the cases outlined Wednesday included false claims for COVID-19 testing while another involved a COVID-19 related scheme to defraud insurers out of more than $4 million.

The telehealth fraud allegedly involved a marketing network that lured hundreds of thousands of people into a criminal scheme with phone calls, direct mail, TV ads and online pop-up ads. Telemedicine executives then paid doctors to order unneeded medical equipment, testing or drugs with either no patient interaction or only a brief call. 

Those were either not given to the patients or were worthless to them. The proceeds were then laundered through international shell corporations and banks.

The scheme is similar to one DOJ prosecuted in April 2019 involving fraudulent telehealth companies that pushed unneeded braces on Medicare beneficiaries in exchange for kickbacks from durable medical equipment companies.

The massive bust included the work of 175 HHS OIG agents and analysts and targeted myriad fraud operations across the U.S. and its territories.

One of the larger scams involved 29 defendants in the Middle District of Florida. A telemedicine company and medical professionals working for it billed Medicare for medical equipment for patients they never spoke to.

In New Jersey, laboratory owners paid marketers to get DNA samples at places like senior health fairs. Doctors on telemedicine platforms then ordered medically unnecessary and not reimbursable genetic testing.

 

 

 

 

Medicare Advantage should not ‘game the system’ but prioritize patient care, honest billing

Posted on by • Posted in Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Fraud and Abuse, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Office of Inspector General (IG), Physician, Profit, Profit Motive, Quality of Care, Risk Assessment • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/medicare-advantage-should-not-game-the-system-but-prioritize-patient-care/585613/

We all agree healthcare providers should prioritize patient well-being and bill honestly. Most do. But, if not, my office, the Office of Inspector General for the HHS, and other government agencies, are watching. 

We are especially monitoring an area of concern: abuse of risk adjustment in Medicare Advantage, the managed care program serving 23 million beneficiaries, 37% of the Medicare population, at a cost of about $264 billion annually. We have good reason to pay attention. Our recent report found that Medicare Advantage paid $2.6 billion a year for diagnoses unrelated to any clinical services.

Plans used a tool called “health risk assessments” to collect these diagnoses. Ideally, health risk assessments might be part of a Medicare beneficiary’s annual wellness visit and help care teams identify health issues. However, some Medicare Advantage plans use risk assessments without involving the patients’ regular care providers. 

Some plans partner with businesses whose primary livelihood entails identifying diagnoses by conducting risk assessments. Some organizations send professional risk assessors, perhaps practitioners with some medical credentials but not physicians or other clinicians involved in the person’s care, to the beneficiaries’ homes.  Our study found that 80% of that extra $2.6 billion payment resulted from in-home health risk assessments. 

Medicare’s capitated payments vary by beneficiary for good reason. If Medicare paid the same for every beneficiary, plans might favor younger and healthier enrollees. It may not hold true every month, but, on average, it will cost a plan less to serve a healthy 65-year-old than an older person with diabetes or cancer.

Risk adjustment tailors the capitated rate to each beneficiary’s expected costs, so plans should enroll any interested beneficiary and not discriminate. But the risk adjustment is just a projection. Beneficiaries need not actually incur higher costs for the plan to receive higher payments. Some beneficiaries with a seemingly low risk will incur high costs in a given year and some beneficiaries with a high risk will incur low or even no costs.

In fact, one Medicare Advantage plan received about $7 million for beneficiaries who did not appear to receive any clinical care that year — other than the risk assessment, which was the only reason for the higher Medicare payment. Finding beneficiaries with high risk scores but low care utilization can prove a profitable business strategy. 

Without gaming, on the aggregate, risk-based payments and utilization should even out over time.  But what if plans do game the system? Perhaps making their beneficiaries look sicker? Or not providing care for beneficiaries’ health conditions?

We identified two main concerns:

  • bad data — risk of incorrect diagnoses identified in the health risk assessment resulting in incorrect payments to plans.
  • suboptimal care — risk that diagnoses are correct, but patients are not getting the care they need.

The question of whether beneficiaries are experiencing quality and safety problems requires more study. For example, it is possible that beneficiaries are receiving care, but plans are not submitting this data as required. Regardless, plans that use risk assessments to gather diagnoses, but then take no further action, are clearly missing an opportunity for meaningful care coordination. We urge Medicare Advantage plans to:

  • Ensure practices drive better care and not just higher profits.  
  • Enact policies and procedures to ensure the integrity and usefulness of the data.

This could include measures like educating patients about the identified diagnoses and sharing them with caregivers. These steps are consistent with the best practices identified by CMS and provided to Medicare Advantage Plans in 2015.

It is not necessarily bad that Medicare allows risk assessments to influence payment, trusting that plans use risk assessments to identify missed diagnoses and not to fabricate nonexistent diagnoses. 

However, this practice only helps patients if there is some additional intervention to improve care. If risk assessments are performed by third parties, at minimum, the beneficiary and the beneficiary’s care team should learn the results. Risk assessments should trigger meaningful care coordination, patient engagement and help ensure the care team takes appropriate action. Risk assessments that generate diagnoses for payment purposes, but result in no follow-up care raise serious concerns.

Ensuring beneficiaries receive the care they need should be front of mind for executives as they design risk assessment programs with an eye to quality of care and better care coordination. Failing that, executives should know that government agencies will scrutinize risk adjustment for abuse. 

In response to our report, CMS promised to provide additional oversight and target plans that reap the greatest payments from in-home health risk assessments and conditions generated solely by risk assessments for which the beneficiaries appeared to receive no other clinical services. My office has identified red flags in some industry patterns and recommends plans adopt best practices. Executives should champion best practices and make sure their plans are driving correct diagnoses and quality care.

Ensuring that beneficiaries are properly diagnosed is important, not just for the integrity of taxpayer-funded federal healthcare programs, but also for the welfare of the beneficiaries served. Coordinating care and providing appropriate follow up is critical.

My office and other government agencies are targeting oversight to make sure plans do not pad risk adjustments with unsupported diagnoses. When plans find new real diagnoses, the plans deserve the extra payment, but only if patients get appropriate care.

 

 

 

 

Administration delays final rule easing anti-kickback regs until next August

Posted on by • Posted in American Hospital Association (AHA), Anti-Kickback, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Office of Inspector General (IG), Physician, Stark Law, Walmart • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/trump-admin-delays-final-rule-easing-anti-kickback-regs-until-next-august/584158/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202020-08-26%20Healthcare%20Dive%20%5Bissue:29307%5D&utm_term=Healthcare%20Dive

Dive Brief:

  • CMS has pushed back publishing a final rule that would ease anti-kickback regulations on providers by a year. The move is likely to anger healthcare organizations that have long clamored for the rule’s relaxation.
  • The deadline to finalize the rule proposed Oct. 17, 2019, is now Aug. 31, 2021. Originally, the rule relaxing stipulations of the decades-old Stark Law was expected this month. It’s unclear how the extension affects OIG’s tandem rule slacking similar regulations outlined in the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute and the Civil Monetary Penalties Law.
  • CMS chalked up the delay to the need to detangle the many thorny issues raised by healthcare companies in their comments on the rule. “We are still working through the complexity of the issues raised by comments received on the proposed rule and therefore we are not able to meet the announced publication target date,” Wilma Robinson, HHS deputy executive secretary, wrote in a notice on the change dated Monday. CMS did not respond to requests to clarify what issues are tying up the rule.

Dive Insight:

Hospital groups are unlikely to be pleased with the delay. The American Hospital Association earlier this month sent the Office of Management and Budget a letter urging them to expedite the review and release of the final Stark and AKS regulations.

“These rules take on even more significance in light of the COVID-19 pandemic,” AHA EVP Thomas Nickels wrote in the letter dated Aug. 19. “These rules will remove unnecessary regulatory burden from hospitals and health systems, allow for enhanced care coordination for patients, improve quality, and reduce waste in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”

AHA did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.

Healthcare organizations have said the Stark Law and Anti-Kickback Statute, passed decades ago in an attempt to deter physicians from referring patients to other locations or for services that would financially benefit them, are outdated and burdensome. Providers say the proposed changes are long overdue, citing longstanding concerns the laws hinder efforts to coordinate patient care across different sites and episodes.

The proposed rule, if finalized, would sharply ease federal anti-kickback regulations in a bid to help providers use value-based payment arrangements, reflecting the growing shift away from fee-for-service reimbursement and siloed care models.

The rule clarified exemptions from the physician self-referral law for certain value-based payment arrangements among physicians, providers and suppliers. Specifically, it applies to models with a specific patient population, where one of the entities takes on full financial risk for providing Medicare Part A and Part B for the first six months. The payments can either be capitated or global.

Doctors would be required to pay back a fourth of payments if they don’t meet financial goals.

The proposed rule also introduced a new exemption for certain arrangements under which a doctor receives limited payment for items and services that he or she provides, and another that would allow hospitals and medical device manufacturers to donate cybersecurity tools and other related software to doctors without fear of retribution.

Comments on the proposed rule from the hospital and physician community were generally supportive of the changes, though some organizations, including the American Hospital Association and Walmart, thought the feds didn’t go far enough. Hospital groups argued the exceptions should be expanded to include private payers, along with Medicare and Medicaid and the definition of value-based arrangements should be broadened, along with some other clarifications.

Per the Social Security Act, agencies have to maintain a regular timeline for publishing final regulations, normally within three years of the draft. However, they are allowed to extend the original deadline, if they justify the change.

 

 

 

 

Many workers don’t get new paid sick leave, because of ‘broad’ exemption for providers, report finds

Posted on by • Posted in Coronavirus, Dept of Labor, Employee Benefits, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Labor Union, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Office of Inspector General (IG), Pandemic, Sick Leave, Worker Protection, Worker Rights • Leave a comment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/11/paid-sick-leave/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202020-08-12%20Healthcare%20Dive%20%5Bissue:29035%5D

Many health-care workers don't get new paid sick leave, because of ...

The New York attorney general sued the Labor Department in April over the agency’s interpretation of ‘health care provider’.

A government watchdog said in a report out Tuesday that the Labor Department “significantly broadened” an exemption allowing millions of health-care workers to be denied paid sick leave as part of the law Congress passed in March to help workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in March to ensure workers at small- and medium-size companies were able to take paid leave if they or a family member became sick with the coronavirus. The law exempts health-care providers as well as companies with more than 500 employees.

But an Office of the Inspector General report noted that a move by the Labor Department to more broadly expand how they categorize health-care providers ended up leaving far more workers without a guarantee of paid sick leave than the agency’s estimate of 9 million.

While existing federal statutes define health-care workers as doctors, someone practicing medicine or providing health-care services, the Labor Department’s exemption from paid sick leave included anyone employed at a doctor’s office, clinic, testing facility or hospital, including temporary sites. The report also found the agency also exempted companies that contract with clinics and hospitals, such as those that produce medical equipment or tests related to the coronavirus, the OIG found.

The report also suggested the Labor Department is not doing enough to enforce the paid-sick-leave provisions, as well as its existing laws on pay and overtime issues.

In an effort to be socially distant, the federal agency acknowledged it has been forgoing fact-finding, on-site investigations, where an investigator examines all aspects of whether an employer is complying with federal labor laws. Instead, the agency has been using conciliations, which are telephone-only reviews limited to looking into a single issue affecting one or a few employees, with no fact-finding.

Critics of the Labor Department’s more hands-off approach to the pandemic have seized on the report as another indication of the ways in which the Trump administration has abandoned its commitments to worker safety.

“The Inspector General’s report makes clear that the Department of Labor went out of its way to limit the number of workers who could take emergency paid leave,” Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), the chairman of the House Education Committee, said in a statement. “This absence of meaningful enforcement of our nation’s basic workplace laws creates a major risk to workers who are already vulnerable to exploitation amid record unemployment.”

Before the pandemic, limited or full on-site investigations, a more robust way the agency looked into pay and overtime issues, made up about 53 percent of its inquiries. But since March 18, only 19 percent of those inquiries have been on-site investigations.

Actions taken to enforce the sick-leave provisions in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act have skewed even further away from investigations: 85 percent have been resolved through conciliations.

The agency’s Wage and Hour Division responded to the OIG’s findings, noting that they were “developing and sharing models for conducting virtual investigations,” and that they also pledged to maintain a backlog of delayed on-site investigations to be tackled when it was safer to conduct those reviews.

But critics suggest the pandemic alone is not a sufficient excuse for the drop-off in investigations, some aspects of which could be done remotely.

“These numbers just look so different than the numbers that I’m used to seeing in terms of conciliations versus investigations,” said Sharon Block, a senior Obama administration labor department official. “It really does jump out. That 85 percent is just a really big number.”

The issue about expanding who gets to opt out of offering paid sick leave has been the subject of complaints, according to the OIG report, as well as a federal lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James. That lawsuit argued that the Labor Department overstepped its authority by defining health-care providers in such broad terms, saying it could be skewed to include workers such as teaching assistants or librarians at universities, employees who work in food services or tech support at medical schools, and cashiers at hospital gift shops and cafeterias.

Judge J. Paul Oetken, of New York’s Southern District, struck down the Labor Department’s definition, as well as three other provisions last week — but confusion remains about whether his ruling applies only to employers in New York.

In an internal response to the OIG report, which predates the New York ruling, the Labor Department said that it agreed with many of the OIG’s recommendations and that it would continue to use its definition of health-care providers until the resolution of the federal lawsuit.

The Labor Department did not reply to requests for comment about whether it planned to contest the judge’s ruling, or the other findings in the report.

The inspector general pointed to other ways the department is not doing enough to adjust to the challenges of the post-outbreak world.

The OIG report said that while the agency’s Wage and Hour Division referenced the coronavirus in an operating plan in late May, it pointed out that the division “focuses more on what the agency has already accomplished rather than thinking proactively and describing how it will continue to ensure FFCRA compliance while still maintaining enforcement coverage,” the report noted.

The department did not provide any goals about the enforcement or provide any requirements for tracking and reporting the new violations created by the FFCRA.

“With the predicted surge of covid-19 cases nationwide in upcoming months as more Americans return to work and as a consequence, an anticipated increase in complaint call volume to WHD, it would be expedient of the agency to devise a detailed plan as to how it intends to address this issue,” the OIG noted.

The report is the latest to spotlight the Trump administration’s employer-friendly approach to worker safety and protections.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the part of the Labor Department that investigates and is charged with upholding worker safety, has been criticized by workers and advocates for failing to issue citations for worker safety issues during the pandemic in significant numbers. It had only issued four citations out of more than 7,900 coronavirus-related complaints, according to figures from July 21.

 

 

 

Trump says IG report finding hospital shortages is ‘just wrong’

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, American Hospital Association (AHA), Clinical Testing, Communication, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health Policy, Healthcare Providers, Nurses, Office of Inspector General (IG), Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Physician, Public Health, Public Safety • Leave a comment

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/491454-trump-says-ig-report-finding-hospital-shortages-is-just-wrong?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=28856

Hospital Experiences Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results ...

President Trump on Monday claimed that an inspector general report finding “severe” shortages of supplies at hospitals to fight the novel coronavirus is “just wrong.”

Trump did not provide evidence for why the conclusions of the 34-page report are wrong.

He implied that he is mistrustful of inspectors general more broadly. He recently fired the inspector general of the intelligence community, which has drawn outrage from Democrats.

“Did I hear the word inspector general?” Trump said in response to the reporter’s question about the findings.

“It’s just wrong,” Trump said of the report.

The inspector general report, released earlier Monday, was based on a survey of 323 randomly selected hospitals across the country.

It found “severe” shortages of tests and wait times as long as seven days for hospitals. It also found “widespread” shortfalls of protective equipment such as masks for health workers, something that doctors and nurses have also noted for weeks.

“The level of anxiety among staff is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” one hospital administrator said in the report.

Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, noted that the report’s survey of hospitals was conducted March 23 to March 27. He said testing had improved since then and that it was “quite a long time ago.”

Trump asked who the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services is.

“Where did he come from, the inspector general?” Trump said, adding, “What’s his name?”

The office is currently led by Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general.

According to her online biography, Grimm joined the inspector general’s office in 1999. 
Trump said the U.S. has now done more testing than any other country. “We are doing an incredible job on testing,” he said.
He also berated the reporter asking the question, saying testing has been a success.
“You should say, ‘Congratulations. Great job’ instead of being so horrid,” Trump said.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) on Monday said the inspector general report was accurate.

The report “accurately captures the crisis that hospitals and health systems, physicians and nurses on the front lines face of not having enough personal protective equipment (PPE), medical supplies and equipment in their fight against COVID-19,” the AHA said.

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-20-00300.pdf?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=28856