Profits at most county-owned hospitals have grown by 100 percent to 400 percent over the past four years via partnerships with nursing homes that have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in extra federal money.
Strand Diagnostics lost a key court battle on July 30 when a federal judge in Indianapolis granted summary judgment in favor of the Medicare program, which has refused to reimburse Strand for its test since 2012.
With this year’s bill estimated at $37 billion and counting, perhaps the sheer cost of cleaning up after IT security breaches at health care organizations will spur the industry to find a bandage for its hemorrhaging computer systems.
Many parents of children with special needs have to choose between working to help cover added expenses or unemployment so they can tend to their child full time. Financial planning is vital for these families, parents and special-needs advocates said.
Anthem turned out unheard of gains in 2014, the first year of Obamacare’s new health insurance overhaul, as Anthem’s customers numbers held steady but their spending with hospitals and doctors plummeted.
New data released Wednesday morning suggest that Eli Lilly and Co.’s Alzheimer’s drug has a modest but lasting impact on the memory-sapping disease. But analysts worry the impact is too small to be meaningful.
Healthiest Employers LLC, which collects and measures corporate health information, plans to use the funds to drive sales of its analytics software.
The money, known as reinsurance payments, helped MDwise, Anthem, Humana, Assurant and the Physicians Health Plan of Northern Indiana keep a lid on their losses even as lots of new patients with expensive or untreated medical conditions migrated into the private insurance market.
Wellness company On Target Health LLC, which one year ago launched a program to help overweight workers lose fat but not muscle, is seeing strong results from its first two clients.
Cigna said Anthem’s a risky bet due to fallout from its massive data breach, lawsuits that accuse it of conspiring to inflate prices, and lack of a growth strategy. But Wall Street thinks this deal is going to happen, unless Cigna can find another buyer.
But hospitals’ list prices in Indiana are more than three times what the federal Medicare program pays.
If Anthem merged with Cigna Corp. it would create a behemoth with even greater negotiating power, which could benefit employers but hurt doctors and hospitals.
The Obama administration could write a new regulation. Congress could pass a short law. States could run a low-cost exchange. But the politics might require all parties to let the tax credits die while they try to pin the blame on the other side.
The new version of the Healthy Indiana Plan, backed by Obamacare funding, has enrolled 229,000 new participants in four months without breaking stride.
It took $394,000 to rank in the top 1 percent of U.S. earners in 2013. And more than 100 of the Indiana contingent in that exclusive club were physicians employed by one of the four major hospital systems that operate in the Indianapolis area.
The individual hospital campuses around Indianapolis saw their collective revenue rise 8 percent and their collective operating profits rise 22 percent from from 2011 to 2013. That’s solid, just not stellar, growth.
In Indiana, Anthem has struck accountable care organization deals with 14 health care provider groups and signed up nearly 2,900 primary care providers to its medical home program. And it’s pushing for more in the future.
For employer health plans, diabetics generate $10,000 more per year in medical bills than non-diabetics. That means the rise in the prevalence of diabetes over the past 25 years is costing Hoosiers an extra $2.6 billion annually.
That’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of what Hoosiers and their health plans spend on hospital care each year. But it’s a step in the right direction.
A Health Department audit found nurse staffing routinely short on two patient units at IU Health’s Methodist hospital, where nurses are trying to organize a union.
