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Providence, the country鈥檚 10th-biggest hospital chain, says it鈥檚 too expensive to upgrade an older hospital, so it will join forces with giant Kaiser Permanente to build a new one.
Community Health Systems, a large, for profit hospital chain, shrank from more than 200 to 84 facilities. It is continuing to sue patients for hospitals that now exist as little more than legal entities.
Big Bend Regional Medical Center, the only hospital in a sparsely populated region of West Texas, announced that because of a nursing shortage its labor and delivery unit must close for days at a time and patients must go instead to a hospital an hour away.
KHN Editor-in-Chief Elisabeth Rosenthal appears on "CBS This Morning" to discuss the latest installment of the KHN-NPR Bill of the Month investigative series.
A bicyclist from California competed in a Pennsylvania race that could have landed him in this month鈥檚 Tokyo Olympics. Instead, a crash on the velodrome track landed him in two hospitals where his out-of-state, out-of-network surgeries garnered huge bills.
U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kansas) introduced a bill to do away with a health insurance rule that dictates which parent鈥檚 plan becomes a new baby鈥檚 primary insurer. This could save some parents from unexpected, sometimes massive medical bills. Davids took up the issue after a KHN/NPR Bill of the Month story on one family鈥檚 unexpected $207,455 NICU bill.
Kaiser Health News gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories.
A year and a half after Sutter Health agreed to a tentative settlement in a closely watched antitrust case, the San Francisco judge presiding over the case indicated she would sign off on the terms, pending agreement on another contentious issue: attorney fees.
With covid cases on the upswing again around the country, partisan division remains over how to address the pandemic. Meanwhile, the Biden administration proposes bigger penalties for hospitals that fail to make their prices public as required. Stephanie Armour of The Wall Street Journal, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico and Tami Luhby of CNN join KHN鈥檚 Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Also, for 鈥渆xtra credit,鈥 the panelists suggest their favorite stories of the week they think you should read, too.
Only severely injured patients are supposed to be billed for 鈥渢rauma team alert鈥 fees that can exceed $50,000.
Two intractable failings of the U.S. health care system 鈥 addiction treatment and medical costs 鈥 come to a head in the ER, where patients desperate for addiction treatment arrive, only to find the facility may not be equipped to deal with substance use or, if they are, treatment is prohibitively expensive.
KHN and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media this week to discuss their stories. Here鈥檚 a collection of their appearances.
Policies mandating company approval before talking publicly about conditions in hospitals have been a source of conflict over the past year, as physicians, nurses and other health workers have been disciplined for speaking or posting about what they view as dangerous covid-19 safety precautions. The appeals court鈥檚 decision could mean that hospitals 鈥 and other employers 鈥 will need to revise their policies.
Your dutiful columnist tried to make use of a federal 鈥渢ransparency鈥 rule to compare the prices of common medical procedures in two California health care systems. It was a futile exercise.
A Trump administration rule mandating that hospitals disclose true prices on their websites took effect this year. But compliance is spotty and even when the data is public, it鈥檚 hard to find and understand.
A college student never got an answer for what caused her intense pain, but she did get a bill that totaled $18,736 for an ER visit. She and her mom, a nurse practitioner, fought to understand all the charges.
Even after recovering from covid, many patients experience respiratory or other problems and, since this effect of the virus is so unpredictable, medical experts aren't sure when it is safe to undergo elective surgery. But medical experts are setting up guidelines.
Eager to control costs, health systems and insurers are trying to address patients鈥 social needs such as food insecurity, transportation and housing. Yet, after years of testing, there鈥檚 slim evidence these efforts pay off.
About three dozen elite health systems are involved in for-profit hospital projects overseas. Though the systems are exempt from U.S. taxes for providing 鈥渃ommunity benefit,鈥 there鈥檚 limited evidence that such business ventures benefit American patients.
HCA charges patients an 鈥渁ctivation fee鈥 of up to $50,000 for trauma teams at centers located in half its 179 hospitals 鈥 and they often don鈥檛 need trauma care, an analysis of insurance claims data shows.
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