High pay for hospital CEOs doesn’t spell better care, NH study finds
Posted July 06, 2012, at 8:59 a.m.
Everybody agrees the health system needs to improve patient results even as it becomes more efficient. So shouldn’t we reward hospital managers who make progress in both areas? That doesn’t seem to be the case in New Hampshire, according to a new study from the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies.
At a time when many contend that hospitals should focus on outcomes rather than the volume of care provided, in New Hampshire there is “virtually no correlation between hospital [CEO] pay and either quality or cost” at nonprofit health systems, the study said.
“Given these hospitals exist to provide quality health care and are required to provide community benefit and charitable care in light of their non-profit status, the lack of such a correlation is a significant concern,” New Hampshire Attorney General Michael A. Delaney said in a prepared statement this week. The New Hampshire Department of Justice regulates the state’s nonprofit sector.
Instead, the CEOs’ compensation packages correlated closely with the size of the institutions they ran, the study found. The bigger the system, the more the CEO generally made. The boss of Lebanon’s Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital ($1.1 billion in revenue) pulled down $785,000 in 2009, while the CEO of Colebrook’s Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital ($15 million in revenue) made $150,000.
Delicate Pivot as Republicans Blast Rivals on Medicare Cuts
By JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — For much of the past year, Republicans assailed President Obama for resisting the Medicare spending reductions they say are needed to both preserve health benefits for older Americans and avert a Greek-style debt crisis. Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House Republicans’ point man on the budget, has called the president “gutless.”
Yet since the Supreme Court upheld the Democrats’ 2010 health care law, Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, have reversed tactics and attacked the president and Democrats in Congress by saying that Medicare will be cut too much as part of that law. Republicans plan to hold another vote to repeal the law in the House next week, though any such measure would die in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“Obamacare cuts Medicare — cuts Medicare — by approximately $500 billion,” Mr. Romney has told audiences.
That is a reprise of Republicans’ mantra of the 2010 midterm elections, which gave them big gains at both the state and federal levels and a majority in the House. Yet the message conflicts not only with their past complaint that Democrats opposed reining in Medicare spending, but also with the fact that House Republicans have voted twice since 2010 for the same 10-year, $500 billion savings in supporting Mr. Ryan’s annual budgets.
The result is a messaging mess, even by the standards of each party’s usual election-year attacks that the other is being insufficiently supportive of older people’s benefits.
Dr. Drew Pinsky’s relationship with drugmaker raises ethical questions
By Manuel Roig-Franzia,
For more than a quarter-century, Dr. Drew Pinsky has been a seemingly tireless talker, an interpreter of maladies for audiences on radio, television and the Internet.
The ubiquitous physician with the California-cool vibe, the trim physique and the hipster eyewear has been a television doctor to rehabbing celebs and, in the process, has become a celeb himself.
And now, with the Dr. Drew brand firmly embedded in the national consciousness — at a moment when he regularly spins out best-selling books and hosts or co-hosts not just one, but three shows — Pinsky is becoming a clinical specimen for that most basic of capitalist afflictions: subtle hucksterism. Buried in a gargantuan Justice Department settlement announced this week with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline are details of a sweet deal Pinsky cut to promote the depression drug Wellbutrin, also known by the name Bupropion.
Pinsky isn’t charged in the Glaxo case, which resulted in a corporate guilty plea and a record $3 billion settlement for fraudulently hawking unapproved uses of the diabetes drug Avandia and the depression medicines Wellbutrin and Paxil. But his entanglement in the case illustrates the ethically murky knitting of physicians (and their bank accounts) with drug companies, a fraught relationship that reformers have sought to address by adding sunshine provisions to the Obama administration’s health-care law, which recently survived mostly intact after a Supreme Court challenge.
Obama takes the offensive on his healthcare law
He touts its provisions on the road in Ohio, while Romney seems to stumble and comes under fire from conservatives.
5:01 PM PDT, July 5, 2012
| advertisement |
MAUMEE, Ohio — A week after the Supreme Court upheld most of President Obama's signature domestic policy achievement, the politics of healthcare held center stage in the presidential campaign, shoving aside the economic debate that has dominated most of the last several months.
In a notable shift of tactics after months of talking only minimally about healthcare in public, Obama went on the offensive Thursday and emphasized the law during a campaign bus trip through the crucial swing state of Ohio.
As he did so, his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, was on the defensive, under attack from leading conservatives for purported failures in handling the issue. The criticism reflected long-standing anxiety among conservatives that Romney's history on healthcare would make him a flawed carrier of the party's message.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-campaign-healthcare-20120706,0,7679357,print.story
LePage says IRS 'new Gestapo' in radio address | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram
Posted: 10:24 AMUpdated: 10:44 AM
LePage says IRS 'new Gestapo' in radio address
Gov. Paul LePage used his weekly radio address to blast President Obama's health care law and described the Internal Revenue Service as the "new Gestapo."
http://www.pressherald.com/news/Governor-says-IRS-new-gestapo-in-radio-address.html
Martin: Memo from Maine — Don’t follow our example on health care
Posted By Opinion On June 21, 2012 @ 9:00 pm In Opinion | 4 Comments
Editor’s note Garrett Martin is the executive director of the Maine Center for Economic Policy [1]. He has been observing the effects of changes to Maine’s health insurance laws made in 2011.
Vermont’s courageous effort to provide health insurance to all its residents is an inspiring model for other states. Maine’s recent experience? Not so much.
That’s why it’s so surprising that Jeff Wennberg of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom recently suggested that Vermont embrace health insurance deregulation modeled on recent changes in Maine. If anything, Maine’s new policy is useful only as an example to be avoided. Our health care costs are still growing quickly and the number of Maine residents who don’t have insurance is increasing.
Premium increases are largest for precisely those who can least afford it — seniors and small businesses, especially in rural Maine. Small, rural health care facilities may be forced to close their doors, leaving thousands of Mainers without nearby care. Clearly, a power shift from regulators to insurance companies has weakened consumer protections.
Proponents of Maine’s new health insurance law claim that premiums have gone down. But they’re only presenting a small part of the picture – and they’re not even getting that right. One recent report cited a 60 percent drop in rates for one individual health plan, but failed to identify the real reason for the drop: The plan no longer covers maternity care and shifts significantly more costs for prescription drugs and out-of-network care to consumers.
http://vtdigger.org/2012/06/21/martin-memo-from-maine-dont-follow-our-example-on-health-care/print/
By Clare O'Connor | Forbes – Mon, Jul 2, 2012
I’m 27 and was diagnosed a year ago with Multiple Sclerosis, anautoimmune disease I will have for life. I got it despite my youth, resources, education and mostly healthy lifestyle. It’s a complex disorder, and potentially disabling. But I get to be sanguine about my future: I know that whatever comes, I have a safety net, a growing range of treatment options and the care of a first-class specialist. I have these things because I happen to be a UK national. Constitutional ambiguities aside, Americans should rejoice in a move towards a European healthcare model. Here's why.
http://news.yahoo.com/socialized-medicine-saving-life-131716411.html;_ylc=X3oDMTNudG1uMDZ1BF9TAzIxNDUzNjQ2NzIEYWN0A21haWxfY2IEY3QDYQRpbnRsA3VzBGxhbmcDZW4tVVMEcGtnA2YxMGU2NmJiLTZiMGQtMzBkZC04YTQ0LTkwNWQyYjE0ZTMxYwRzZWMDbWl0X3NoYXJlBHNsawNtYWlsBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3
Vermont’s courageous effort to provide health insurance to all its residents is an inspiring model for other states. Maine’s recent experience? Not so much.
That’s why it’s so surprising that Jeff Wennberg of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom recently suggested that Vermont embrace health insurance deregulation modeled on recent changes in Maine. If anything, Maine’s new policy is useful only as an example to be avoided. Our health care costs are still growing quickly and the number of Maine residents who don’t have insurance is increasing.
Premium increases are largest for precisely those who can least afford it — seniors and small businesses, especially in rural Maine. Small, rural health care facilities may be forced to close their doors, leaving thousands of Mainers without nearby care. Clearly, a power shift from regulators to insurance companies has weakened consumer protections.
Proponents of Maine’s new health insurance law claim that premiums have gone down. But they’re only presenting a small part of the picture – and they’re not even getting that right. One recent report cited a 60 percent drop in rates for one individual health plan, but failed to identify the real reason for the drop: The plan no longer covers maternity care and shifts significantly more costs for prescription drugs and out-of-network care to consumers.
http://vtdigger.org/2012/06/21/martin-memo-from-maine-dont-follow-our-example-on-health-care/print/
How Socialized Medicine Is Saving My Life
By Clare O'Connor | Forbes – Mon, Jul 2, 2012I’m 27 and was diagnosed a year ago with Multiple Sclerosis, anautoimmune disease I will have for life. I got it despite my youth, resources, education and mostly healthy lifestyle. It’s a complex disorder, and potentially disabling. But I get to be sanguine about my future: I know that whatever comes, I have a safety net, a growing range of treatment options and the care of a first-class specialist. I have these things because I happen to be a UK national. Constitutional ambiguities aside, Americans should rejoice in a move towards a European healthcare model. Here's why.
http://news.yahoo.com/socialized-medicine-saving-life-131716411.html;_ylc=X3oDMTNudG1uMDZ1BF9TAzIxNDUzNjQ2NzIEYWN0A21haWxfY2IEY3QDYQRpbnRsA3VzBGxhbmcDZW4tVVMEcGtnA2YxMGU2NmJiLTZiMGQtMzBkZC04YTQ0LTkwNWQyYjE0ZTMxYwRzZWMDbWl0X3NoYXJlBHNsawNtYWlsBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3
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