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Tag: Florida

HCA: The Bashful Giant

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JEFF GOLDSMITH

Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 1.25.29 PMJudging by its nearly invisible public presence, you’d never know that this is prime time for HCA, the nation’s largest hospital chain.    A former HCA regional VP, Marilyn Tavenner, runs the nation’s Medicare and Medicaid programs.  Former CMS Head and Obama White House health policy chief Nancy Ann DeParle, sits on the HCA Board.  Its longtime investor relations chief, Vic Campbell, is immediate past Chair of the highly effective trade group, the Federation of American Hospitals.  And its Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Perlin, MD, is Chair Elect of the American Hospital Association.

This astonishing industry leadership presence is something most health systems would be trumpeting, perhaps even placing ads in Modern Healthcare.  But not HCA, the bashful giant of American healthcare.  Most hospital systems make a show of “branding” their hospitals with the company logo.  Yet in its corporate home, Nashville, and the surrounding multi-state region, HCA’s 15 hospital network is called TriStar.  Everyone in Nashville’s tight knit healthcare community knows who owns their hospitals, but you have to read TriStar’s home page closely to find the elliptical acknowledgement of HCA’s ownership.

Despite a nationwide merger and acquisition boom, HCA hasn’t done a major deal in twelve years (Health Midwest in Kansas City joined HCA in 2002).  The company has not participated in the post-reform feeding frenzy, continuing a long-standing and admirable tradition of refusing to overpay for assets. For the moment, owning 160 hospitals is plenty.

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Did Massachusetts Health Care Reform Hurt Access To Care For the Previously Insured?

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By Ashish Jha, MD

In 2006, Governor Mitt Romney signed Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006 entitled “An Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care.” It has been described by many names, including Massachusetts Healthcare Reform (MHR), Romneycare, or simply, as the template for the Affordable Care Act. The goal of the act was straightforward: to ensure near-universal access to health insurance for citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The bill quickly led to insurance expansion: by 2010, 94.2% of adults under 65 had health insurance, an 8 percent increase over the 86.6% in 2006. By all accounts, the goals of insurance expansion were met.

But the bill has not been without controversy. There have been two main concerns: first, that the bill did too little to control rising healthcare costs. The cost crisis led to the 2012 bill that many refer to as “Mass Health Reform 2.0” – formally called Chapter 224 of the Acts of 2012. Its focus is to curtail healthcare spending, and while reasonable people have reasons for skepticism about the likelihood of success, that’s a topic for another day.

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What the Rick Scott Decision Says About the Future of Health Care in the U.S.

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By Dan Diamond

In 2009, Rick Scott founded Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, a health care pressure group opposed to President Obama’s health reforms.

In 2010, Scott ran for governor of Florida on a mission to repeal Obamacare.

In 2012, Scott … will work to implement Obamacare.

For some conservatives, it’s a shocking reversal. Leaders of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative organization backed by the influential Koch brothers, were publicly disappointed in the Florida governor — who not so long ago said the Affordable Care Act was “the biggest job killer in the history of the country.”

Now, it will be Scott’s job to help implement it.

Changing Tune

Given his prominence, Scott’s move from Obamacare opponent to grudging supporter may be the biggest symbolic shift on the law since its passage.

The Florida governor was reportedly pressured by state legislators to negotiate with federal officials over the ACA, once November’s election made clear that Obamacare was here to stay.

But Scott won’t be the last GOP official to change his tune. More health care groups in other Republican-led states are putting similar pressure on their leaders to opt into the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, in hopes of securing additional dollars for providers.

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Roundup of State Ballot Initiatives on Health Issues

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By Katie Booth

This November, voters weighed in on an array of state ballot initiatives on health issues from medical marijuana to health care reform. Ballot outcomes by state are listed below (more after the jump).

Voters in Alabama, Montana, and Wyoming passed initiatives expressing disapproval of the Affordable Care Act, while a similar initiative in Florida garnered a majority of the vote but failed to pass under the state’s supermajority voting requirement. Missouri voters passed a ballot initiative prohibiting the state executive branch from establishing a health insurance exchange, leaving this task to the federal government or state legislature.

Florida voters defeated a measure that would have prohibited the use of state funds for abortions, while Montana voters passed a parental notification requirement for minors seeking abortions (with a judicial waiver provision).

Perhaps surprisingly, California voters failed to pass a law requiring mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food. Several states legalized medical marijuana, while Arkansas voters struck down a medical marijuana initiative and Montana voters made existing medical marijuana laws more restrictive.

Colorado and Washington legalized all marijuana use, while a similar measure failed in Oregon.

Physician-assisted suicide was barely defeated in Massachusetts (51% to 49%), while North Dakotans banned smoking in indoor workplaces. Michigan voters failed to pass an initiative increasing the regulation of home health workers, while Louisiana voters prohibited the appropriation of state Medicaid trust funds for other purposes.

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Health Plan Case Studies: A New Florida Blue

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By Kent Bottles, MD

One of the perks of giving keynotes all over the country is being able to hear what other health care leaders are saying without having to pay the conference fees. One of my major keynote themes is that everyone (patients, doctors, hospitals, employers, and health plans) will have to change in order to thrive during the current health care delivery system transformation.

Recently in Delray Beach, I stayed after my keynote to hear Florida Blue CEO Patrick Geraghty describe his first year of trying to change the Blue Cross/Blue Shield franchise to respond to health care reform. I have written elsewhere about the health plan response to the changing environment, but Geraghty’s speech highlighted how urgent and how difficult change can be when an industry business model is disrupted by federal legislation and market forces.

Geraghty has led the Blues effort in Florida to update their name, mission, vision, and values. Focus groups revealed that the new name Florida Blue was easier to say and communicated a less corporate, more friendly image than the old name Blue Cross Blue Shield which brought to mind adjectives such as corporate, distant, and expensive.

A four paragraph mission statement was replaced by a single sentence: “To help people and communities achieve better health.” The vision statement was rewritten to now describe the company as “a leading innovator enabling healthy communities.” The five corporate values now include the familiar “respect,” “integrity,” and “excellence,” and the more unusual “courage” and “imagination.”

What I found most intriguing and revealing was how these new efforts are being translated into concrete tactics such as opening retail centers and partnering with Disney on a new innovation institute.

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Unleashing An Epidemic: Florida Gov Rick Scott Shows The Folly Of Cutting Safety Net Hospital Funding

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By David Whelan

When Florida voters elected Rick Scott back in 2010 they may have thought they were getting a health care expert. After all, his claim to fame was building the largest for-profit hospital company. Boy were they wrong.

The list of Scott’s public health missteps are vast–such as trying to gag doctors from discussing guns with patients, taking credit for refusing to perform abortions at his old company, trying to shut down a monitoring database that would keep pain pill addicts from getting more prescriptions, and pushing the sale of the state’s public hospitals to buyout funds to raise money to close the deficit.

But this latest one may be the most tragic. In March Governor Scott moved to close A.G. Holley hospital, a small 100-bed safety net institution specializing in tuberculosis. The Palm Beach County public hospital had operated for 60 years. Closing it saved only $5.4 million, which is what its costs were last year. Scott justified the closure saying that TB cases had dropped by 10% in recent years.

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Feds’ Power Grab Must Be Stopped

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By PAM BONDI

Florida and more than half of the states in the nation have challenged the federal government’s Affordable Care Act because it deprives Americans of their individual liberty and violates the United States Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to enforce constitutional limitations on federal authority — or, conversely, whether to allow the federal government to dominate states and individuals to the point of dictating day-to-day decisions.

The court should reaffirm the basic constitutional bargain struck among the states that makes our federal government one of limited, enumerated powers.

The act’s chief problem is its individual mandate, which requires virtually everyone to obtain health insurance coverage simply as a condition of living in America. Forced conscription into a commercial market is a startling new exercise of federal power that Congress has never before attempted.

The individual mandate’s stated goal is to lower insurance costs by forcing “healthy individuals” to buy expensive policies that they do not want or need so that insurers can charge less to others. Congress’s central planning on both the supply and demand side of the insurance market exceeds its constitutional authority because the bare power to “regulate” commerce does not include the power to force Americans into commerce. If it did, there would be no end to Congress “fixing” markets with the wallets of ordinary citizens. Congress could require Americans to obtain unwanted loans to bail out failing banks, to purchase a car to reinvigorate struggling carmakers or to buy solar panels to resuscitate failed Solyndra-like investments.Continue reading…

Florida’s Problem: Cutting Medicaid May Cost More

By David Williams

Florida is concerned that it spends too much on Medicaid. Unfortunately for policymakers, proposed cuts to Medicaid are likely to be self-defeating according to an Orlando Sentinel article. They may result in more spending as well as boosting the number of people with no coverage – especially children. Components introduced under the guise of personal responsibility –such as charging $10 per month per beneficiary or $100 for non-emergency use of the emergency department– have great intuitive appeal to taxpayers and legislators, yet can backfire in practice.

Experience from Oregon suggests that even modest, sliding scale premiums result in huge drops in coverage. A report from the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University suggests 82 percent of those who leave coverage would be children, of whom 98 percent would be below the poverty level.

There are clear examples of emergency room overuse, but what’s crystal clear in retrospect is not always evident up front. In any case, hospitals can do their part with effective triage that sends patients to lower acuity settings or back home when patients who shouldn’t be there show up.

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Florida Sanctions Top Medicaid Prescribers, After a Shove

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By Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein

At Dr. Huberto Merayo’s bustling psychiatry practice in Coral Gables, Fla., hundreds of poor patients on Medicaid walked away each year with prescriptions for powerful antipsychotic drugs.

Merayo’s prescriptions for the drugs totaled nearly $2 million in 2009 alone, state records show.

The 59-year-old psychiatrist is also in demand by the makers of these drugs. He’s earned more than $111,000 since 2009 delivering promotional talks for AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly & Co. and Pfizer, according to ProPublica’s database of drug-company payments to doctors.

This year, Florida regulators finally challenged Merayo’s enthusiasm for the pricey drugs, which are used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A state review found he hadn’t documented why patients were prescribed the pills and had given them to patients with heart ailments or diabetes despite label warnings.

In May, Florida summarily ended his contract with Medicaid. But the action, though decisive, followed years of high prescribing by Merayo, according Florida’s own statistics. And he was booted only after public questioning by U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who had asked states to investigate such cases.

Merayo’s situation is one of at least three in which Florida allowed physicians to keep treating and prescribing drugs to the poor amid clear signs of possible misconduct.

The state’s responses were marked by head-scratching errors, including the misspelling of Merayo’s name on official documents, and lengthy delays.

In another example, Florida allowed Dr. Joseph M. Hernandez of Lake City to continue prescribing narcotic pain pills to Medicaid patients for more than a year after he was arrested and charged in 2010 for trafficking in them.

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Privatize Medicaid? Have We Learned Nothing??

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By MONA MANGAT, MD

As we move thru 2011, many states are eagerly progressing with implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We have many Early Innovators that are leaders in setting up the state based exchanges.  These states are Kansas, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Wisconsin and a multi-state entity led by the University of Massachusetts Medical School that consists of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont.  Furthermore, Vermont is poised to pass the country’s first state-wide single payer system.

You can imagine when I look in my own back yard I get a bit depressed. Despite our 80 degree sunny weather, our state is leading the charge to overturn the ACA. Our newly elected governor, Rick Scott (the past CEO of Columbia/HCA when the company pleaded guilty to MCR fraud and paid $1.7 bil fine) is singularly focused on not implementing the ACA in Florida. As the months go by and other states move forward, we continue to move backwards.

As expected, it is the poor and sick that continue to suffer the most. The current assault occurring in Florida is on Medicaid. Medicaid currently covers close to 3 million Floridians (nearly 15% of the population) at a cost of nearly $19 billion dollars. The cost of each state Medicaid program is a burden shared jointly by the states and the federal government.

For every $1 spent by the state, the federal government matches $1.84. Florida Medicaid already has some of the most restrictive eligibility criteria in the country, such that the only people who can qualify for Florida Medicaid are: 1) low-income infants, toddlers, preschool-age children, and pregnant women; 2) extremely low-income school-age children, seniors, people with disabilities; and 3) parents of children in deep poverty. 60% of FL Medicaid recipients are children.Continue reading…