News

This summer’s financial market volatility and the continuing pressure on government spending have made it more cumbersome for healthcare companies to secure capital.

Everyone following national economic policy news knows the basics: the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, authorized by August’s Budget Control Act, must create a plan to reduce the national deficit by at least $1.2 trillion. This plan must be in place by Nov. 23, and we all expect Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to be hit hard.

When the merger of hospitals owned by Stanford University and the University of California at San Francisco dissolved in 2000, it was to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and a lot of misery. Such failures are very rare say merger and acquisitions insiders.

New technologies in remote patient monitoring will push the market to $22.2 billion by 2015 as these solutions are used increasingly to combat soaring healthcare costs and personnel shortages and to reduce hospitalization times, according to a recent report from healthcare market research firm Kalorama Information.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is proposing to fix the Sustainable Growth Rate by sharing the cost of repealing the SGR among physicians, other health professionals, providers in other sectors and beneficiaries. The response from those in the industry has been less than supportive.

The proportion of Americans who reported going without or delaying needed healthcare declined modestly between 2007 and 2010, according to a national report released in late August by the Center for Studying Health System Change.

According to a report last month from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Medicare Advantage premiums will decrease by an average of 4 percent in 2012 and plans expect enrollment to increase by as much as 10 percent. This comes on the heels of an earlier announcement showing that the average Part D prescription plan premiums would remain virtually unchanged in 2012.

The Veterans Health Administration, the largest integrated healthcare system in the country, has long employed many of the approaches Medicare is pushing on all hospitals to cut unnecessary readmissions. But new data show VA hospital patients are just as likely to end up back in the hospital as are patients at private hospitals.

Ignoring months of protests, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced in late August the next steps for a major expansion of a competitive bidding program designed to help lower costs for quality durable medical equipment, prosthetics, orthotics and supplies.

When thieves cut a hole through the roof of Eli Lilly’s Enfield, Conn. warehouse on a Sunday in March 2010, they were able to rappel inside and fill tractor trailers full of anti-depressants and cancer-fighting drugs. The heist netted the thieves $75 million worth of goods and brought to the attention of the nation a problem that had been increasingly plaguing the pharmaceutical industry: the theft of pharmaceutical products by organized criminals.