How North Carolina Made Its Hospitals Do Something About Medical Debt
State officials threatened to withhold public money from hospitals, pioneering a strategy that could become a national model.
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State officials threatened to withhold public money from hospitals, pioneering a strategy that could become a national model.
One rural North Carolina county is on track to be among the first where a hospital reopens owing to a new federal hospital classification meant to help save small, struggling facilities.
Ballad Health, a 20-hospital system with the nation's largest state-sanctioned hospital monopoly, serves patients in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
Many Catholic health systems, which are tax-exempt, pay their executives millions and can charge some of the highest prices around — while critics say they scrimp on commitments to their communities.
Insurance coverage for abortion care in the U.S. is a hodgepodge. Patients often don’t know when or if a procedure or abortion pills are covered, and the proliferation of abortion bans has exacerbated the confusion.
Political drama involving a rural Georgia county reflects how state regulations that govern when and where hospitals can be built or expanded are evolving.
“Certificate of need” laws, largely supported by the hospital industry, limit health facility construction in 35 states and Washington, D.C. Georgia lawmakers decided its law was complicating the reviving of two hospitals critical to their communities.
Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was established to exclusively admit Black patients during a time when Jim Crow laws barred them from accessing the same health care facilities as white patients. Its closure underscores how hundreds of Black hospitals in the U.S. fell casualty to social progress.
Proposed legislation would require the state attorney general’s consent for a wide range of private equity acquisitions in health care. The hospital lobby negotiated an exemption for for-profit hospitals.
This installment of InvestigateTV and KFF Health News’ “Costly Care” series digs into patients' getting charged hospital prices for doctor’s office care. For five years, a patient got the same injection from the same office. Then it changed how it billed and she owed more than $1,100 for one treatment.
Kamala Harris fought health care consolidation during her tenure as California’s attorney general, and she could escalate the fight nationally if she wins in November. Still, the pace of mergers has accelerated.
Hospitals in several states are partnering with a private equity-backed company to offer combined emergency and urgent care in a single building. But patients may not realize prices vary between the two services — often by a lot.
Legal maneuvering, industry lobbying, and lax IRS oversight leave lots of room for “operating surpluses.”
Montana’s proposal to increase oversight is part of a national trend by states to ensure nonprofit hospitals act as charitable organizations as they claim tax-exempt status. But the state has yet to set standards for how much the hospitals must do.
In this episode of “An Arm and a Leg,” host Dan Weissmann speaks with Georgann Boatright, a patient in Mississippi who was willing to drive to another state to avoid paying a steep fee to her local hospital.
Fewer than half of rural U.S. hospitals offer labor and delivery services. In some areas, births have dropped by three-quarters since the baby boom’s peak.
Increasingly, Americans pay for the privilege of seeing a doctor. Research shows concierge medicine can further hamper access to care for those who can’t afford the upgrade.
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