Author: Scott Welch
An ambitious plan tailored to deliver coronavirus vaccines to California’s most vulnerable populations is fraying under pressure to simplify and speed up the state’s rocky vaccination rollout. A week after Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded vaccine eligibility to residents 65 and older, state officials are now proposing a plan to complete vaccinations for all seniors before ...
As intensive care units filled and coronavirus cases surged over the holidays, Carmela Coyle invoked a World War II-era quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to rally her own troops: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Coyle is head of the California Hospital Association, and her “troops” are the highly paid hospital ...
For more than a decade, employers have been searching for ways to reduce the ever-escalating cost of employee health insurance, while still offering a strong benefits package. By partnering with nontraditional brokers, many employers were making headway; some even began to spend less while offering more-comprehensive benefits. Then came the pandemic, and all bets were ...
Joe Biden ran on an expansive health care platform during his 2020 presidential campaign, with a broad array of promises such as adding a government-sponsored health plan to the Affordable Care Act and lowering prescription drug prices. Perhaps most significantly, he pledged to get control of the COVID pandemic that claimed more than 400,000 American lives ...
Many of the COVID-19 relief provisions included in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, Economic Security Act (CARES), and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Notice 2020-29 were set to expire at the end of the 2020 calendar year. As infection rates continued to soar into the holiday season, employers and group health plan ...
Large hospitals and health systems have been inconsistent in their approaches to compliance with a major new rule that requires them to post payer-negotiated rates online, and experts warn this could cause confusion for consumers. Hospitals had to post the payer-negotiated rates for 300 shoppable services online starting Jan. 1. But while some hospitals have posted spreadsheets with their ...
With COVID-19 patients pushing hospitals across Southern Nevada to near capacity, one Las Vegas hospital issued a disaster declaration over the weekend. St. Rose Dominican Hospital, San Martin campus, issued the declaration Saturday, when a surge in patients increased occupancy in its intensive care unit to 137 percent, according to an email obtained by the Review-Journal that was sent by the administration to hospital physicians.
With most Americans focused on COVID-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies are quietly raising the list prices of name-brand prescription drugs at a torrid pace. January is typically when increases hit the U.S. market. Already, more price hikes by drugmakers have been recorded in less than half a month (813) this year than for all of January 2020 (737), according to research by Ohio ...
President Biden plans Thursday to issue a new national strategy to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and to take executive actions intended to make tests and vaccines more abundant, schools and travel safer, and states better able to afford their role in the long road back to normal life. On his second day in office, ...
California lawmakers are wasting little time debating the $227 billion budget proposal Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week. In a break with the normally slow-moving process that drags out for months, budget committees in both the Assembly and state Senate convened this week to review the governor's spending plan, which includes immediate financial relief to families and businesses hard hit by the pandemic.