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Biden Administration Seeks to Exclude Medical Debt from Credit Scores The Biden administration announced plans to develop new rules that would prevent unpaid medical bills from counting towards consumers’...
CA Assembly Passes Data Delete Act California’s Assembly passed a bill ( SB 362 ) that would let consumers request the deletion of data collected on them by third-party brokers with the click of...
CA Legislature Approves $25 Healthcare Worker Minimum Wage On the last day of this year’s regular session, California lawmakers passed a bill ( SB 525 ) that would phase in a nation-leading $25...
Just last month, Illinois became one of the latest states to enact a law requiring parties involved in healthcare mergers to observe a waiting period before closing their transactions. The bill, HB 2222...
TX Judge Strikes Down ‘Death Star’ Law A county judge in Texas declared the state’s new so-called “Death Star” law preempting local ordinances, including those mandating...
Washington’s acute care hospitals, which provide inpatient and outpatient care in addition to nursing services, posted a 13 percent, or $929 million, aggregate net loss in the first three months of 2022, according to a study from the Washington State Hospital association.
Hospital expenses were up about 11 percent over last year, while revenues rose only about 5 percent.
The financial struggles of Washington’s hospitals are part of a national trend, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, labor shortages that are forcing hospitals to depend more on contract labor, and inflation-related cost increases for medicines and supplies. (SPOKESMAN-REVIEW [SPOKANE])
Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery (R) announced last week the state is suing Walgreens for unlawfully selling and distributing prescription opioids. Slatery said the company’s pharmacies sold 1.1 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills - about 175 per state resident - between 2006 and 2020. (TENNESSEAN [NASHVILLE])
Hospitals with more Black patients received less in federal reimbursements than those with fewer Black patients, according to a study released this month from the University of California Los Angeles, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard universities. The nation’s 574 “Black-serving” hospitals, the 10 percent with the most Black patients, were paid $283 less per patient per day than other hospitals. And if reimbursed at the same level as other hospitals, Black-serving hospitals would have received $14 billion more in payments, or $25 per hospital, in 2018 alone. (BECKER’S HOSPITAL REVIEW)
With orders for Eli Lilly & Co.’s COVID-19 monoclonal antibody drug bebtelovimab drying up from the federal government, the company plans to start selling the treatment to states, hospitals, and other healthcare providers. The shift will probably be the first test of whether COVID-19 vaccines and treatments will remain accessible through the commercial market. (WALL STREET JOURNAL)
CVS is looking to move into primary care this year through investment in or acquisition of a provider, the company’s CEO Karen Lynch said during an earnings call last week. The news follows Amazon’s recent acquisition of One Medical for roughly $3.9 billion and Walgreens’ $5.2 billion investment in primary care provider VillageMD. (FIERCE HEALTHCARE)
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will report hospital safety data as usual next year. The backlash from patient safety advocates evidently convinced CMS officials to abandon their plan of keeping some of the data from the public, due to distortions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. (STAT, KAISER HEALTH NEWS)
-- Compiled by KOREY CLARK