Las Vegas Hospitals Call For Backup To Handle Hundreds Of Shooting Victims
People line up to donate blood at a special United Blood Services drive at a University Medical Center facility to help victims of the mass shooting Sunday in Las Vegas.
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Hospitals across the Las Vegas area were inundated Sunday evening when hundreds of people injured in the mass shooting at a country music festival on the Strip arrived at their doors by ambulances and private car.
And hundreds of doctors, nurses, and support personnel were called into work to help handle the patients that were lined up in ambulance bays and hallways, officials say.
Following the shooting, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said at least 58 people had died and 515 were injured after a gunman opened fire on thousands of people at a crowded outdoor concert.
While the numbers still may be in flux, they are enormous by any standard.
The University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, the state’s only comprehensive trauma center, received 104 patients, according to spokeswoman Danita Cohen. Four people died and 12 remained in critical condition Monday, Cohen says.
Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center saw 180 people who were injured in the shooting, including 124 people with gunshot wounds, according to Dr. Jeffrey Murawsky, the hospital’s chief medical officer. It’s the closest hospital to the site of the shooting and is a Level 2 trauma center, which means it can provide definitive care for all injured patients.
St. Rose Dominican hospital in nearby Henderson treated another 58 patients, five of whom are in critical condition, according to spokeswoman Jennifer Cooper.
The victims need blood donations, local officials say, and people are lining up to give.
“No one can say they’ve seen anything like this,” Sunrise’s Murawsky told All Things Considered on Monday. “We’ve seen events that have brought us 30 patients at once.”
He said 100 extra doctors were called in to work Sunday night, along with another 100 people including nurses, technicians, and support staff.
“We have a relatively large emergency department. We were able to triage within our emergency department,” he says. “We used the hallway space to see patients, so it’s a lot fuller than it normally would be and it feels a lot more chaotic.”
At University Medical Center, patients were being triaged in the ambulance bays, Cohen told CNN. The hospital has an 11-bay trauma center, with three operating bays, as well as regular surgery suites, which they likely used in this situation.
“We can get patients from an ambulance into the OR [operating room] in one minute,” Cohen says.
As reports of the gunfire emerged shortly after 10:30 p.m. PST Sunday, the city’s trauma centers began calling in extra personnel.
People working in trauma centers train for such emergencies and would know they’re likely to have to report to work as soon as they heard about the shooting on the news or social media. But still, the scale of this incident may have been surprising. “When you think of more than one hundred shooting victims, ballistic injuries, that is an absolute giant number,” says Bruno Petinaux, the chief medical officer and co-chair of emergency management at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.
“When you’re talking about a mass casualty incident like this, this is where you call in the backup, and you call in the backup to the backup, and you may have to message the rest of your medical staff that you may need their help,” he says.
Petinaux says trauma centers have incident command structures in place to determine what kinds of people they need. A mass shooting is very different than a chemical incident or a fire.
In Las Vegas on Sunday, calls were likely going out to surgeons first, but not just surgeons. “Surgeons don’t work in a vacuum,” Petinaux says. “We’re now talking anesthesiologists, we’re talking about nurses, we’re talking about even pharmacists coming in. You may need to bring in more cleaners to help clean the OR and turn it around quickly.”
The Southern Nevada Health District, which includes Las Vegas and Clark County, has a 65-page trauma system plan that lays out how emergency responders and hospitals should communicate, work together, and divide responsibilities in a mass casualty situation.
Most major cities have such a plan, says Ian Weston, executive director of the American Trauma Society, which advocates for victims of trauma and the trauma care system.
“Hospitals are prepared to build capacity,” he says. “They’ll get the most critical patients into surgery quickly, they’ll stabilize more in the ER and some will even be treated in the lobby.”
He says hospitals determine exactly how many people they can care for in such a situation, even taking into account how many people they can fit into hallways, at least temporarily.
'Hypoallergenic' And 'Fragrance-Free' Moisturizer Claims Are Often False
A recent test by dermatologists found that 83 percent of the top-selling moisturizers that are labeled “hypoallergenic”contained a potentially allergenic chemical.
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For most people, buying a “fragrance-free” or “hypoallergenic” moisturizer that turns out to be neither, might be frustrating, but not harmful. But for people with sensitive skin or conditions like eczema or psoriasis it can be a big problem.
“I will start to itch and I have to get it off my body right away,” says 62-year-old Kathryn Walter, who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Walter has a severe case of eczema and always chooses moisturizers that claim to be free of fragrance and allergy-causing additives. But more often than not, Walter ends up with a product that clearly isn’t.
“My ankles and calves are all scratched up as we speak and my hands,” she says.
For people like Walter, moisturizers aren’t just for smoothing skin. They can actually treat the dry, cracked and reddened skin that come with conditions like eczema. But finding the right moisturizer can be truly “hit or miss,” she says.
“Because you can’t just go to a drug store and open up all their tubes of cream to make sure they don’t aggravate your skin.” So Walter ends up throwing a lot of products away.
“Basically, it’s a big expense,” she says.
“Every single day, I get questions about what moisturizer should I use, what sunscreen should I use,” says Dr. Steve Xu, a dermatologist at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
“I found myself really struggling to provide evidence-based recommendations for my patients,” he says. So he decided to take on the challenge of figuring out “what’s actually in this stuff.”
Xu and some of his colleagues at Northwestern, examined the ingredients of the top 100 best-selling moisturizers sold by Amazon, Target and Walmart. And what he found was pretty surprising, he says. Nearly half — 45 percent — of the products in the study that claimed to be “fragrance-free” actually contained some form of fragrance. And the vast majority — 83 percent — of products labeled “hypoallergenic” contained a potentially allergenic chemical.
Bottom line: The vast majority of moisturizers that are best sellers “have some form of potential skin allergen,” Xu says.
And when a product is labeled “dermatologist-recommended,” Xu says “it doesn’t mean much,” because there’s no way of knowing how many dermatologists are recommending it, or who they are.
“It could be three dermatologists, or a thousand,” he says.
In large part, the deceptive labels result from the lack of federal regulation of these sorts of products. The Food and Drug Administration considers moisturizers cosmetic and barely regulates them. There are some labeling requirements, but they can be easily avoided by companies that claim the ingredients are “trade secrets,” says Dr. Robert Califf, vice chancellor for Health Data Science at Duke University School of Medicine and a former FDA commissioner.
“The cosmetics industry is highly competitive,” Califf says, “and if someone can easily copy someone else’s successful cosmetic, that would be a competitive disadvantage.”
And, when it comes to adverse reactions, manufacturers aren’t required to report consumer complaints about cosmetics. This means the FDA doesn’t know the extent of the problem, says Califf.
“I don’t think it’s too much to ask of manufacturers that they [be required to] register what they’re selling so that it can be tracked,” he says.
Califf wrote an editorial accompanying Xu’s study; both were published in a recent issue of JAMA Dermatology.
Congress is now considering legislation that could make the industry more accountable. In the meantime, dermatologist Xu recommends what he calls a “skinny, skin-diet.”
“What we mean is, using the least amount of products with the least amount of potentially allergenic materials or chemicals in them,” he says, “to reduce the risk.
Xu says some single-ingredient products — like petroleum jelly, shea butter, sunflower oil or cocoa butter — can minimize the risk of an allergic skin reaction.
For People With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, More Exercise Isn't Better
Sara Wong for NPR
Health organizations are emphasizing that ME/CFS is not a psychological disorder and that standard forms of exercise do not help. Instead, they’re acknowledging that exercise can make the disease much worse unless doctors and patients are very careful.
The Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention has already revised its patient guidelines on ME/CFS and is currently revising the ones for physicians.
The action by the federal agency is a significant shift in the years-long controversy over diagnosis and management of the disease, which is characterized by months of incapacitating fatigue, joint pain and cognitive problems.
And last week, the National Health Services in the U.K. said it would reassess its guidelines for ME/CFS recommending exercise, after 20 members of Parliament signed a petition urging a review.
Doctors and patient advocates say the update by the CDC is a major victory for people with ME/CFS, and that a revision of British guidelines is sorely needed. They are hoping other major medical sites will follow suit and revise their information on the disease, which is thought to affect at least a million Americans.
Many websites have outdated information, that perpetuates a key misperception about CFS: “That you can exercise your way out of this illness,” says Dr. Nancy Klimas of Nova Southeastern University in Miami, who has served on the ME/CFS advisory committee for the Department of Health and Human Services and has treated people with ME/CFS for 30 years. “That’s just not true. You can exercise, but you have to be extremely cautious. And it will not cure you.”
Even just a small amount of exercise or simple exertion can make some people much sicker, Klimas says.
“If a doctor sends a patient to the gym to do endurance exercise, that’s going to be a disaster,” Klimas says. “Doctors do that all the time, and these patients get much, much worse.”
In particular, she says, the British guidelines, set by the National Institute for Health Care and Excellence, have been harmful for patients.
“They are rooted in a very controversial study, which suggests people do a much more vigorous and much more dangerous form of exercise,” Klimas says. “Those guidelines have hurt a lot of people. And they were implemented all around the world.”
The controversial recommendations on exercise can be tracked back to an influential but erroneous paper published in 1989, in which British doctors offered a “new approach” for treating the disease.
In the paper, the doctors largely dismissed the disease as psychological. They said the pain patients felt after exercising was basically in patients’ heads. And if they exercised long enough, these symptoms would subside.
So to treat the disease, the authors presented two recommendations: cognitive behavioral therapy combined with a gradual increase in exercise — even if symptoms started to get worse. The therapy was supposed to help people get over “maladaptive” avoidance of exercise after the initial illness. “For example, if the patient admitted to thinking ‘I feel tired, I must have done too much’,” the authors wrote, “One might ask the patient to look for alternative explanations, such as ‘I may be tired because I haven’t being doing much lately.’ “
Jump ahead 30 years, and what is known about ME/CFS has greatly evolved, says biologist Mauren Hanson, who studies ME/CFS at Cornell University.
Doctors now know that the disease makes people incredibly sensitive to exertion. “There’s some level of exercise that makes your symptoms get worse,” Hanson says.
In particular, anaerobic exercise seems to cause the most problems, Hansen says. When your body doesn’t have enough oxygen to support exercise, lactic acid starts to build up in muscles.
“This is when you start feeling out of breath,” Hanson says. “There are some expert ME/CFS physicians who have had success with advising patients what heart rate their anaerobic metabolism typically kicks in,” Hanson explains, “And then they advise those patients to keep their heart rate below that level.”
The problem is, this threshold is different for each person. So blanket recommendations for general exercise programs can be extremely harmful. “I’ve heard many anecdotal cases of individuals who found themselves either bedbound or in wheelchairs after they started exercise programs advised by their physicians,” Hanson says.
But the medical community has been slow to come up to speed on ME/CFS, Hanson says. Many doctors aren’t aware of the dangers with exercising. Some still have the misperception the disease is psychological. And you can still find the two original treatment strategies promoted on major medical websites, such as the Mayo Clinic and WebMD.
The CDC’s information about ME/CFS has evolved over the past few decades. Back in 2006, their webpages recommended specific types of exercises and even suggested the number of reps to do. Some patients followed instructions like this and saw their symptoms get worse.
“I did exactly what the CDC told me,” says Julie Rehmeyer, a science journalist in Santa Fe, N.M., who wrote a book about her experience with ME/CFS. “I started with a low level of exercise and built up slowly. But if I pushed when I wasn’t feeling very good, I found that I would lose the entire next day. I wouldn’t be able to walk, get of bed — even move.”
This past summer, the agency removed the last remnants of the two controversial recommendations. In particular, the agency no longer lists cognitive behavioral therapy as management tool for ME/CFS. And it removed the phrase “graded exercise,” which to many doctors in the field referred to the controversial strategy promoted by the NHS in England.
“We had heard from patients that doctors were using this [guideline] as an excuse to tell patients, ‘you must do more and more exercise,’ and that’s not what it was intended to reflect,” says CDC spokesperson Jennifer McQuiston. “We do not want to cause harm.”
The new guidelines emphasize the need for doctor supervision when it comes to exercise programs for people with ME/CFS, McQuiston says. And doctors need to understand that this program needs to be tailored specifically for each person.
“We’re attempting to caution health care providers, who may be looking at our website: When managing a patient with ME/CFS, it can’t be a one-size-fits-all program.”
Price Resigns From Trump Cabinet Amid Private Jet Investigations
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, shown here at a discussion about opioids on Thursday, drew fire for his use of private jets.
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Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned Friday in the face of multiple investigations into his use of private charter and military jets to travel around the country at taxpayer expense.
A statement released by the White House Friday afternoon said that Price had “offered his resignation earlier today and the president accepted.”
President Trump had said multiple times this week that he was “not happy” about the optics of Price’s travel.
In his resignation letter, Price said, “I regret that the recent events have created a distraction” from his work at HHS.
The White House said that Trump intends to designate Don Wright, currently deputy assistant director for health and director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at HHS, as acting secretary.
The work-related travel, which was first reported Sept. 19 by Politico, cost taxpayers nearly $1 million, or about $400,000 for private charters and $500,000 in military airplane costs. Most of the trips were between cities where inexpensive commercial flights were also available.
The revelations had sparked a flurry of criticism from government ethics watchdogs.
Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which oversees some parts of Price’s agency, wrote an angry letter to the secretary on Thursday about his travel habits.
“The decision is particularly shocking as you serve in an administration that routinely calls for draconian spending cuts and a reduction in government waste, and you yourself have repeatedly advocated for fiscal restraint,” Murray wrote.
HHS Inspector General Daniel Levinson launched an investigation of Price’s travel spending on Sept. 22, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has requested information on the flights.
Price tried to contain the damage on Thursday by promising to pay back the costs for his own seats on those flights chartered on his behalf, or about $52,000. But that offer didn’t approach the total costs of the trips, which included his staff and sometimes his wife.
“I regret the concerns this has raised regarding the use of taxpayer dollars,” he said in a statement.
But that wasn’t enough. On Friday, rumors mounted that Price’s tenure was in peril, fueled by Trump’s own afternoon statement that an announcement would be coming soon.
Price, a former Republican congressman from Georgia, was confirmed in February to lead HHS, the trilion-dollar agency that runs Medicaid, Medicare and the National Institutes of Health. It also administers the federal health care exchange created by the Affordable Care Act.
He had a reputation as a budget hawk who would fight government waste and rein in spending.
A former orthopedic surgeon, Price was a fierce opponent of the ACA, also known as Obamacare. While serving as head of HHS, he cut the agency’s spending for outreach and advertising in support of the insurance exchanges created by the law and issued news releases and created videos critical of the law’s effects on the individual insurance markets.
Price was often criticized for what appeared to be efforts to undermine a law he was charged with implementing.
The travel scandal wasn’t Price’s first brush with ethics problems.
During his confirmation hearing he faced tough questioning from Democrats over a series of stock trades in which he made money selling shares in companies over which his committees or the House held sway.
Price, 62, who had been chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee and a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, says he followed all congressional ethics rules, but his well-timed trades made it appear that he could have used his position to influence the price of stocks he owned or that he had received special treatment from companies in which he invested.
In one case he got access to special discounted shares of an Australia-based biotech company called Innate Immunotherapeutics. The price of the shares then quadrupled.
In another case, Price bought shares in Zimmer Biomet, an Indiana-based manufacturer of replacement knees and hips, and then introduced a bill that would have affected the price of such joint replacement surgery.
Seema Verma, a protege of Vice President Pence’s, has been mentioned as a possible successor to Price, The Associated Press reports. Verma leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which runs health insurance programs that cover more than 130 million Americans.
Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has also been mentioned frequently. He is a physician with health policy expertise, including prior stints as the FDA’s deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs and before that as a senior adviser to the FDA commissioner.
Some States Make It Hard For Teen Moms To Get Pain Relief In Childbirth
Throughout the U.S., minors are generally required to have permission from a parent or legal guardian before they can receive most medical treatment. However, each state has established a number of exceptions.
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Nearly a decade ago, Maureen Sweeney worked at a Cleveland-area hospital during nursing school, completing her labor and delivery rotations. She helped hundreds of women deliver their children, many of whom were minors in their early teens.
That’s because, in Ohio, the rate of teenage pregnancy is slightly higher than the national average. This year, about 23 in 1,000 teenage girls will become pregnant.
One patient in particular from those nursing school days sticks out in Sweeney’s mind.
“It was a 15-year-old woman who was coming in, in labor, to the emergency room,” Sweeney remembers.
The teen was scared. She didn’t talk much and didn’t trust any of the doctors. She told Sweeney she had no family and that she was a runaway.
“She was by herself and she was living on the streets or between friends’ houses,” Sweeney says.
In that moment, Sweeney became the young woman’s only support system to help her through the delivery of her baby.
“So as it progressed and it got more and more painful, she did request an epidural,” Sweeney says.
An epidural is a common type of regional anesthesia that eases the pain of labor. As she had done many times before, Sweeney followed hospital protocol and called the anesthesia department. But to her shock, they told her they could not help her young patient.
“They said that without parental consent, … she would not be able to sign for her own epidural,” Sweeney says.
In Ohio, people under 18 who are in labor cannot consent to their own health care. They can receive emergency services, but nothing considered to be elective. For the many Ohio minors who become pregnant, it’s a painful gap in coverage.
It’s also complicated by the fact that in Ohio, there is no legal process for emancipation: A minor’s parents must be deceased, or the minor must be married or enlisted in the armed forces to be granted independent legal status.
When the hospital wouldn’t authorize an epidural, Sweeney called the office of Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services; oftentimes an agent from children’s services can sign for medical consent in these cases. But it was 3 a.m. The young woman was in active labor and an agent couldn’t make it to the hospital until 9 a.m.
Sweeney remembers how hard to was to tell her patient the news.
“I had to go in, sit down with her and talk about the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to get an epidural, and she was going to have to do this naturally,” Sweeney says.
That’s when the young woman broke down, Sweeney says, and folded in on herself in tears.
Throughout the U.S., minors are generally required to have permission from their parents or legal guardian before they can receive most medical treatment. However, each state has established a number of exceptions.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 26 states allow minors 12 and older to get prescription methods of contraception without a parent’s or guardian’s consent, and just two allow minors to consent, on their own, to an abortion. Ohio is one of 13 states that has no explicit policy allowing a minor to consent to prenatal and pregnancy-related care.
Diana Thu-Thao Rhodes directs public policy for Advocates for Youth, an advocacy organization that focuses on, among other things, the rights of minors to get access to health care. She says in the last few years, minor-consent laws in some places around the country have become increasingly restrictive.
“We can legislate minors’ decision-making much easier because of the fact that they are minors,” says Thu-Thao Rhodes.
Dr. Michael Cackovic, an obstetrician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, says every couple of months he sees a teenage mom who, under Ohio law, is unable to receive elective treatment, like an epidural. He says it’s frustrating to see patients in unnecessary pain.
“First of all, from a labor and delivery standpoint, you don’t like to see anybody uncomfortable,” Cackovic says.
Both Cackovic and Sweeney report that, just as frequently, they’ve had cases where the mothers intentionally denied their teenage daughters an epidural – as a sort of punishment for getting pregnant.
All Cackovic can do is try to talk them out of it.
“To take the mom aside,” he says, “and say, ‘You know, this isn’t some life lesson here. This is basically pain — and there’s no reason for somebody to go through that.’ “
This gap in Ohio law bars a young mother from choosing a C-section. And she can’t consent for a procedure to test for chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus.
Cackovic says he thinks that’s pretty backward: After she gives birth, the teenage mother can consent to the care of her baby, but she can’t consent to the prenatal procedure that would help pinpoint a diagnosis.
There is no way to know for sure how many teens across the country are denied these elective procedures. Thu-Thao Rhodes says in states like Ohio these young patients have been overlooked by lawmakers because they’re not in a position to advocate for themselves.
“The priority for a lot of these young people is to just get the basic health care and services they need,” Thu-Thao Rhodes says, “not spending unnecessary, and often unavailable, time and resources navigating complicated healthcare and legal systems.”
Two Ohio lawmakers, Reps. Nickie Antonio and Kristin Boggs, are currently working to fix this oversight with a state bill, HB 302, that’s progressing through the Ohio House and would allow pregnant minors to consent to health care from the prenatal stage through delivery.
This story was produced in partnership with WOSU and Side Effects Public Media, a reporting collaborative focused on public health.
Why Huge Quality Gaps Among Nursing Homes Are Likely To Grow If Medicaid Is Cut
Roughly 1.4 million people in the U.S. live in nursing homes, and two-thirds are covered by Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for people with low incomes or disabilities.
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Nursing homes that rely the most on Medicaid tend to provide the worst care for their residents — not just the people covered by the program but also those who pay privately or have Medicare coverage.
Despite the collapse of the latest Senate effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, congressional Republicans are still keen on shrinking the amount of Medicaid money Washington sends states.
Down the line, this would create problems for the nation’s 1.4 million nursing home residents — two-thirds of whom are covered by the state-federal health care program for people with low incomes or those with disabilities.
Medicaid already pays less than other forms of insurance. As a result, nursing homes make more than 10 percent on Medicare residents, but lose about 2 percent on the rest of their residents because so many have care paid for by Medicaid.
If the feared reductions in federal funding come to fruition, states would likely respond by either lowering their payment rates or restricting whom they cover and for how long. And the quality of care, experts say, would deteriorate further.
Three charts, based on a Kaiser Health News analysis of ratings from the federal government’s Nursing Home Compare website, illustrate how care suffers in nursing homes where Medicaid is the dominant payer for residents.
The government rates nursing homes on a scale from one to five stars, based on overall quality. The factors weighed are: how well each facility performs on government inspections, how many nurses and aides it employs and how healthy its residents are, as judged by such measures as how often they fall, get infections or are admitted to the hospital.
The first chart below shows the big picture: Nursing homes with higher percentages of residents covered by Medicaid earn fewer stars on the federal government’s overall quality rating system. One-star facilities (lowest quality) average 69 percent of residents on Medicaid; Five-star (highest quality) average 49 percent of residents on Medicaid.
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A prime reason for the disparity, researchers have found, is that nursing homes with the most Medicaid residents can’t afford as many nurses and aides.
Medicare assigns a second type of star rating that represents staffing levels and is based on the ratio of nurses to residents.
As the second chart shows, the staffing differences are huge: The average five-star home has enough nurses and aides to provide 5.4 hours of care a day for each resident, while the average one-star home provides 3.0 hours of daily care per resident. At the best-staffed homes (five stars), only 4 of 10 residents are on Medicaid, meaning the remainder of residents are more lucrative for those facilities. At the worst-staffed homes (one star), 7 of 10 residents are on Medicaid.
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Low staffing is just one factor behind inferior quality ratings for homes that rely heavily on Medicaid, says Dr. David Gifford, senior vice president for quality and regulatory affairs at the American Health Care Association, a nursing home trade group. A facility’s ability to buy medical equipment, medications and oxygen and to keep the building operating can also suffer.
The government publishes a third set of stars representing the results of health inspections. State inspectors give citations to nursing homes that don’t protect residents from bed sores, accidents, infections and other types of harm.
Our third chart shows how facilities with more health violations usually also have more Medicaid beds. At nursing homes with worst inspection records (one star), an average 65 percent of residents are on Medicaid. Places with the best inspection records (five stars) have an average 47 percent of residents on Medicaid.
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“It’s very likely that if Medicaid payment rates freeze or decline, there would be adverse effects,” says Vincent Mor, a professor of health services, policy and practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Nursing homes that can, will get out of the Medicaid business if it’s at all possible. Those that can’t will try to keep their beds as full as possible and live with a negative margin — and reduce food, reduce staff and try to struggle along.”
Mor says the Medicaid cuts might not even save the government money in the end.
“When Medicaid nursing homes are poor and perform poorly, their hospitalization rate increases, and Medicare pays for those hospitalizations,” he says. “If I’m a nursing home and I can barely afford my patients, I’m going to send my patients to the hospital.”
Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation. This story is part of a periodic series — Medicaid Nation — KHN’s look at how Medicaid affects the lives of millions of Americans.
Anthem Says No To Many Scans Done By Hospital-Owned Clinics
Critics of Anthem’s policy say imposing a blanket rule that gives preference to freestanding imaging centers is at odds with promoting quality and will lead to fragmented care for patients.
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Tightening the screws on pricey imaging exams, health insurer Anthem will no longer allow many patients to get MRI or CT scans at hospital-owned outpatient facilities, requiring them to use independent imaging centers instead. The insurer began phasing in these changes in July and expects to finish by March.
Anthem says the change is aimed at providing high-quality, safe care while reducing medical costs.
But critics say that imposing a blanket rule that gives preference to freestanding imaging centers is at odds with promoting quality and will lead to fragmented care for patients.
“To achieve true value, you have to have high-quality care at a good price,” says Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit organization that advocates for improved safety and quality at hospitals.
“Anthem would be better off judging the quality of these [imaging] diagnoses,” regardless of where they’re provided, and setting payment accordingly, she says.
Imaging tests are generally subject to preapproval by Anthem to confirm that they’re medically necessary. Under the new policy, AIM Specialty Health, an Anthem subsidiary, will also evaluate where they should be performed. Doctors who request nonemergency outpatient MRI or CT scans that can be done at an independent imaging center rather than one owned by the hospital will be given a list of centers eligible for patient referrals.
The policy doesn’t apply to mammograms or X-rays.
In rural areas that lack at least two imaging centers that aren’t owned by hospitals, outpatient scans from hospitals will still be approved.
The new policy could save Anthem enrollees hundreds of dollars, says Lori McLaughlin, Anthem’s communications director.
“There are huge cost disparities for imaging services, depending on where members receive their diagnostic tests,” she says. “Members can save close to $1,000 out-of-pocket for some imaging services for those who haven’t met their deductible, and up to $200 for those whose plans require only a copay.”
Hospital imaging is indeed pricier than imaging at freestanding centers. Average prices for MRI and CT scans ranged from 70 percent to 149 percent higher at hospitals, according to an analysis published by the Healthcare Financial Management Association, a membership group for health care finance professionals.
But price isn’t the only important variable, and the perception that all imaging studies conducted by qualified providers generally yield comparable results is wrong, Binder says. A study published last year in The Spine Journal, for example, found that when a “secret shopper” patient with low back pain received MRI at 10 imaging centers over a period of three weeks, each center reported different findings. Some missed a problem they should have found, while others detected nonexistent problems.
The Anthem policy applies to 4.5 million enrollees in individual and group plans in 13 of the 14 states in which Anthem operates, according to McLaughlin. (Self-funded employers that pay their employees’ claims directly are exempted from the policy, but can incorporate it if they wish.) New Hampshire is the only state on that list without an implementation date, McLaughlin says.
This is the second change in coverage from Anthem this year that’s attracted attention. The company has also come under fire for a new policy under which it will no longer pay for emergency department visits that it determines after the fact weren’t emergencies. Some physicians and others worry that policy could discourage people who might need emergency treatment from seeking care.
Patient advocates and health care providers have also expressed concerns about the new imaging rule’s potential impact on patients.
Cancer patients, who often are being treated at cancer centers within hospitals, would feel the effect, notes Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.
“They have to go to a new outpatient facility, get the film, get it read and transmitted back to the cancer center,” Lichtenfeld says. If, as often happens, the hospital and the imaging center’s computer systems don’t talk to each other, the patient may have to bring the results back to the doctor on a CD. “For that patient who’s in a lot of stress to begin with, it adds another level of stress,” he says.
Dr. Vijay Rao, chair of the department of radiology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, says the Anthem policy will create extra effort for hospital radiologists on a patient’s care team, if they need to review and possibly redo the imaging center’s work. Further, relying on a patient to transport the scan so that it can be put into the hospital’s electronic medical record system “leaves lots of room for error,” she says.
Anthem isn’t the only insurer trying to find a way around hospitals’ steeper costs for outpatient imaging, says Lea Halim, a senior consultant at the Advisory Board, a health care research and consulting company. The Medicare program is taking steps as well, although its approach doesn’t directly influence patient care in the same way.
In recent years, hospitals have been snapping up independent physician practices and outpatient imaging and testing facilities, and then charging Medicare higher hospital outpatient fees for their services. In a bid to equalize payments, in January the Medicare program reduced by 50 percent the amount it pays some hospital-owned outpatient facilities — including imaging centers — that are located away from a hospital’s campus.
Kaiser Permanente CEO Says A Bipartisan Health Bill Is The Best Way Forward
Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, is optimistic about a bipartisan health bill. He cautions that partisanship will only lead to more insurance instability.
Misha Friedman/Bloomberg/Getty Images
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Misha Friedman/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Now that the latest GOP health care proposal is being left for dead, you might think that health care reform efforts are over for the near future. But don’t dismiss bipartisan efforts already underway that aim to stabilize the insurance market and potentially give states more flexibility in meeting federal standards.
That’s the sentiment of Bernard Tyson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente, which provides health care to 11.8 million members in eight states and the District of Columbia. Tyson talked with Morning Edition host David Greene this week about what a health care compromise could look like, and how to get there.
Tyson dismisses the idea that the insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are collapsing. While he acknowledges that there have been challenges because of the uncertainties of what requirements will be included in the program next year, and sees the system as vulnerable, “as of right now, no, it’s not close to collapsing,” he says.
“I believe strongly that if the government solves a few vital areas, insurers who got out of the market will get back into the market,” he says, referring to insurers that have pulled out of the exchanges, or threatened to for 2018.
One way to get better decisions about health insurance is to put it in the hands of state governments, Tyson says — which is what Republicans have been focused on.
“That said,” he adds, “there should be some rules of the road, which are the guardrails — as in the Affordable Care Act.”
The “guardrails” could be federal standards for things like preventive care, maternity care and hospitalization, he says.
“There have got to be, in my view, some guidelines so everyone is clear about the threshold requirements across the country,” Tyson says, “given that we’re trying to solve a societal issue, which is [that] millions of Americans are still locked out of the front door of the American health care system.”
He sees room for compromise — agreeing to some federal standards, but also offering states a degree of flexibility in how to best allocate some health dollars to certain health issues. For example, states might know best about how to direct money to fight the opioid epidemic, he says; that could vary by region.
Tyson says a compromise on the health law can happen “as long as Republicans can agree that what we don’t want to do is end up with modifying the law [in a way that] people will lose access.”
He cautions that partisanship will only lead to more insurance instability.
“I think the reality is that the Affordable Care Act was enacted based solely on the Democratic side of the house,” Tyson says. Now, “to those who believe the ACA is a ‘disaster’ that we will solve by coming up with another partisan solution — that’s not good for this country.”
Morning Edition’s Tony Liu, Jessica Smith and David Greene edited and produced the audio version of this interview.
Boston Surgeon And 'New Yorker' Writer Explores Whether Health Care Is A Right
NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, author of the book, Being Mortal, and a staff writer for The New Yorker, about whether health care is a right. Gawande visited his hometown of Athens, Ohio, to find responses to this question are divided.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy Outlines Potential For Bipartisan Health Care Reform
With the failure of the Graham-Cassidy bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, NPR’s Robert Siegel talks to Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and member of the Senate health committee, about whether talks will resume for bipartisan reform efforts.

