Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Deep-Pocketed Hospitals That Received Aid Are Still Pay Executives Millions As They Cut Staff Positions
The New York Times: Hospitals Got Bailouts And Furloughed Thousands While Paying C.E.O.s Millions
HCA Healthcare is one of the world’s wealthiest hospital chains. It earned more than $7 billion in profits over the past two years. It is worth $36 billion. It paid its chief executive $26 million in 2019. But as the coronavirus swept the country, employees at HCA repeatedly complained that the company was not providing adequate protective gear to nurses, medical technicians and cleaning staff. Last month, HCA executives warned that they would lay off thousands of nurses if they didn’t agree to wage freezes and other concessions. (Silver-Greenberg, Drucker and Enrich, 6/8)
The Wall Street Journal: Coronavirus Outbreak Pushes Rural Mississippi Hospital To Brink
The coronavirus pandemic is challenging Mississippi’s rural health-care system as outbreaks worsen in far-flung areas at the same time state officials allow all businesses to reopen. Deep in the state’s southeastern Pine Belt, the latest pressure point is Wayne County, population 20,000, which is served by a single hospital that is more than an hour by ambulance from a larger one in Hattiesburg and two hours from the university medical center in Jackson. (Mauldin, 6/6)
In other news on hospitals —
The New York Times: Coronavirus Jumps The Border, Overwhelming Hospitals In California
For 32 years, Judy Cruz has cared for patients who showed up in the emergency room in the arid, agrarian valley that straddles Mexico along the California border. There have been bad flu seasons that caused hospitalizations to spike; weekends when off-road vehicle collisions in the desert resulted in traumatic injuries and scorching summer days when overheated farm workers required intensive resuscitation. Among the patients was always a smattering of Americans who lived across the border. (Jordan, 6/7)
Modern Healthcare: Biometrics, Algorithms Help Boost Hospitals’ Patient-Matching Rates
A few seemingly small, but consequential, problems could emerge if a name or date of birth is entered with a typo, if a patient has recently moved to a new address, if there are inconsistencies in the way addresses are written, or if patients with similar information are confused with one another. Similar demographics resulted in confusion at a Camden, N.J., hospital in November, after medical staff gave a kidney designated for one patient to another transplant recipient with the same first name, last name and name suffix. (Cohen, 6/5)
Kaiser Health News: Rapid Changes To Health System Spurred By COVID Might Be Here To Stay
The U.S. health care system is famously resistant to government-imposed change. It took decades to create Medicare and Medicaid, mostly due to opposition from the medical-industrial complex. Then it was nearly another half-century before the passage of the Affordable Care Act. But the COVID-19 pandemic has done what no president or social movement or venture capitalist could have dreamed of: It forced sudden major changes to the nation’s health care system that are unlikely to be reversed. (Rovner, 6/8)
