Health Care (page 5)

The Governor and the Republican leadership in the General Assembly both have their feet dug in on the budget battle. The fiscal year ended at the end of June and North Carolina currently does not have a budget for the new biennium (FY 2019-21).   The Senate…

The House Health Committee is scheduled to consider HB 655, Health Care for Working Families, tomorrow morning. First, kudos to the leadership for bringing this issue forward and to members for participating in the discussion.  The governor is strongly in favor of Medicaid expansion. Many progressive House and Senate members…

Back on June 26th, the Wilmington Star News published a letter to the editor written by myself which was a response to an editorial by the newspaper which called on North Carolina to expand Medicaid. In the allotted space, I explained that despite…

Earlier this week, I posted on the blog about a hospital CFO touting his hospital system’s monopoly power as a way to extract profitable reimbursement from the insurers in the area. This is a dim reality in the U.S. health care system that is dominated by hospital…

I write a lot about hospital consolidations and the monopoly problem in health care (See here, here, here, here, and here). It’s widely…

Earlier this week I posted on the blog about a report from WBTV’s Nick Ochsner detailing some documents which showed that UNC Health, a state-owned hospital, had paid nearly $60,000 in taxpayer money to fund a dark money group which represents hospital interests…

We talk about telemedicine as a way that patients and doctors can access each other at a distance for treatment. But, what about connecting medical facilities with drones? That’s the thought behind WakeMed’s drone connection system they are using to transport blood and urine samples between facilities around Raleigh –…

Yesterday the President signed an executive order to direct his cabinet agencies to create rules which would increase price transparency in the healthcare sector. The final rules will require hospitals and insurers to disclose their negotiated rates to the public.  Didn’t the Trump Administration already require…