State and local public health departments across the country have endured not only the public’s fury, but widespread staff defections, burnout, firings, unpredictable funding and a significant erosion in their authority to impose the health orders that were critical to America’s early response to the pandemic. While the coronavirus has killed more than 700,000 in…
Americans pay pharma more than the rest of the world combined for the top 20 blockbuster drugs (see: financial filings by Public Citizen). The U.S. is pharma golden goose! and the analysis shows how much the industry has at stake as it fights Democrats’ plan to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and let employers piggyback off…
Hospitals’ forecast for the second half of 2021 is full of uncertainties, thanks to the unvaccinated and the fast spreading Delta variant. The unvaccinated impact stretches across all areas of a hospitals’ balance sheets and will likely hurt margins in the near- and medium-term. The expectation for the year was that vaccines were going to…
The healthcare industry claims it is in favor of price transparency, but in reality, the industry has fought hard any attempts to unlock the black box of prices. The regulation in question, finalized last November, requires plans and companies that are self-insured to make prices and out-of-pocket costs available for 500 items by Jan. 1, 2023. That…
Going after Kaiser Permanente, a company that many view as the gold standard for Medicare Advantage, indicates the problem may touch almost every corner of the industry. The lawsuit alleges Kaiser Permanente knowingly made its Medicare Advantage patients look sicker than they were, to obtain more money from the federal government. These allegations, which come…
Insurers and employers are not able to negotiate lower prices with hospital systems or establish smaller networks they believe deliver greater value when 1 or 2 healthcare systems are the only ones that own nearly all clinics and medical practices. These mergers have raised cost by as much as 50%. A new executive order, that…
What solutions are then available to improve the nursing shortage? (continued) Let us discuss the Group 2 recruitment and retention practices. I will end this series with a discussion on retention. Let us start by stating the obvious, in a market with a large labor shortage there is a high premium on retention. Staff retention…
What solutions are then available to improve the nursing shortage? (continued) Let us continue the discussion of the Group 2 recruitment and retention practices. This next strategy is probably one of the most important ones that I can offer. The nursing shortage requires adding foreign educated nurses (FEIN) into their recruitment pools as a long-term…
