Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:
Medicare cuts expected to wound nonprofit hospitals: The 0.4 percent Medicare reduction in inpatient hospital rates for fiscal 2011 will hit nonprofits harder than their for-profit counterparts, according to Moody’s Investors Service. That’s because nonprofits are much more reliant on Medicare patients. The Medicare cut is a key driver for Moody’s maintaining a negative outlook for the hospital industry.
Big Pharma rejoices: A thorn in the side of big drugmakers is moving on. Paul Thacker, an investigator for Sen. Charles Grassley, played a central role in numerous investigations that examined prescription-drug safety and financial conflicts of interest involving academic researchers who simultaneously receive federal grants while also doing work for drugmakers. Thacker’s moving on to a nonprofit and, based on the work he did for Grassley, will be missed–just not by Big Pharma.
ER violence on the rise: As emergency room admissions in recent years have grown, so too has violence against nurses and other hospital workers. Some blame the effects of the economic downturn, as more drug addicts and psychiatric patients seek care at the ER in the face of cuts to programs that once served those populations.
Dealing with the elderly “tsunami”: How will America prepare for the tsunami of elderly Americans (90 million older than 65 by 2050) that will flood our already struggling health system? Telemedicine could be one of the answers.
Fraud and abuse: Political leaders love to talk about the efficiencies and savings to be gained by cutting the fraud and abuse out of Medicare. So why is it that private contractors hired by the government to ferret out that fraud and abuse recovered only $55 million (7 percent) of the $835 million in questionable payments they identified?
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Au revoir, pandemic: The World Health Organization has officially proclaimed the H1N1 pandemic a thing of the past. The WHO chalks it up to “pure good luck” that the pandemic wasn’t more serious and the virus didn’t mutate to a more-lethal form.
Photo from flickr user Daquella manera
