hospitals

Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, says a recent lawsuit is meant to chill the consolidation of medical groups that results in higher prices for consumers. But it may be too late to curb price hikes.

Some hospitals and physician groups are rejecting Medicare Advantage plans over payment rates and coverage restrictions, causing turmoil for patients.

Treatments that don’t help patients, and may even harm them, are difficult to eliminate because they can be big sources of revenue.

The three-day strike involving 75,000 workers in multiple states officially ended this past Saturday and workers returned to their jobs in Kaiser’s hospitals and clinics that serve nearly 13 million Americans.

Two dozen states, from Florida to Washington, have passed laws that allow hospital systems to merge into monopolies, disregarding FTC warnings that such mergers can become difficult to control and may decrease quality of care.

Clinicians, researchers, and workplace safety officers worry new guidelines on face masks from the CDC might reduce protection against the coronavirus and other airborne pathogens in hospitals.

Sepsis occurs when the body responds improperly to an infection and causes organs to work poorly. More than 350,000 Americans die from sepsis each year.

Pueblo, Colorado, residents have higher-than-average medical debt, while the city’s two tax-exempt hospitals provide relatively low levels of charity care.

U.S. officials are trying to clamp down on private arrangements among some hospitals to pay themselves back for the Medicaid taxes they’ve paid. State health officials and the influential hospital industry argue that regulators have no jurisdiction.

After decades of unchecked mergers, health care is the land of giants, with huge medical systems monopolizing care in many cities, states, and even whole regions of the country.