Healthcare Regulations

The Los Angeles city attorney's office has begun investigating whether staff from the city's Hollywood Presbyterian hospital dumped a paraplegic man in a gutter in front of a local mission. Security cameras recorded workers from the hospital arriving, wheeling the man on a gurney into the courtyard, then, after being challenged by the mission's security guards regarding the paraplegic's care, being wheeled back into the ambulance. Later, however, the man was found in a skid row gutter. …

Can hospitals give doctors electronic medical record technology or other IT equipment at no cost? After several months of waiting, the answer still seems to be a big "maybe." Last week the American Hospital Association again asked the IRS to offer clear guidance on whether health IT donations to doctors are okay, okay some of the time or unacceptable. To date, the IRS still hasn't formally replied to the AHA and other industry groups and let them know where it stands.

At the …

CMS has let four more heart transplant centers know that they may lose Medicare and Medicaid funding in 30 days due to the low volume of transplants they've done in recent years. The hospitals include Sutter Memorial Hospital, Hartford Hospital (CT), Washington Hospital Center (Washington, DC) and BryanLGH Medical Center East (Lincoln, NE). CMS has been particularly aggressive in threatening low-end programs of late, in part after a recent investigation found that a fifth of 236 heart, …

As of yesterday, Houston's six stand-alone psychiatric hospitals will lose their Medicaid reimbursement, cutting off funding for treating many mentally-ill adults. The hospitals say that the cutoff will bar dozens of mentally-ill people a day from receiving treatment, because the psych wards in the region's acute-care hospitals often don't have space to take them in. "It's going to be a huge issue," said Dr. George Santos, medical director of freestanding psychiatric facility West Oaks …

The state of California's top health plan regulator, the Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC), is considering rules that might require health plans to get outside input before canceling an individual policy holder's coverage. The DMHC is already investigating policy cancellation practices of Blue Cross of California, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, which have been accused of gaming the system by removing policyholders for innocent, unintentional mistakes in their …

Angering those who don't support its backbone--a doubled tobacco tax--Maryland lawmakers are going ahead with their proposal to cover more of the state's roughly 780,000 uninsured. The plan, which would double the state's tobacco tax to $2, would cover low income workers and subsidize small business coverage. The idea would be to bring far more poor residents into coverage plans, …

Still stinging from its troubles with Vioxx and approved antidepressants that raise suicidal thinking in some teens, the FDA is ready to pay more attention to post-approval drugs. The agency has decided to institute a pilot program under which it will track the way drugs work after they've been on the market for about 18 months. However, it will probably take a year before the program actually kicks off, according to Dr. Steven Galson, director of the agency's drug center. As part of the …

Physicians in Texas who violate a new state abortion-related law (SB 419) should not be charged under the state penal code that carries a maximum charge of the death penalty, Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) said in a legal opinion issued Wednesday. Because Texas defines a fetus as an individual under law, some criminal defense attorneys had questioned whether doctors who illegally perform third-trimester abortions or abortions without parental consent would actually be subject to the …

This isn't chump change. According to a suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, generic drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim Roxane may have bilked the federal government of $500 million in fraudulent and inflated charges for its products. The DoJ says that BIR reported puffed up prices for several of its products, billed CMS for the higher price, then let hospitals and healthcare providers keep the difference in price. The difference was as much as 1,000 percent at times, the DoJ says. …

The California Medical Association is mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. Last week, the group began a campaign to bring patients into its class action lawsuit against Blue Cross of California. The suit, originally filed by a group of individual policyholders, alleges that Blue Cross of California has engaged in a pattern of dumping policyholders after approving expensive treatments, then refusing to pay the bills for those treatments. The state hospital association has …