Kaiser to buy Geisinger?

Yes, this appears to be the case. Medscape reports: In one of the largest healthcare deals to date, Kaiser Permanente is acquiring Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health and investing $5 billion to fold it into a new nonprofit subsidiary called Risant Health, which is set to purchase additional medical groups in coming years.While regulators still must review…

The hospital travels to you

In Bangladesh, seasonal floods occur due to snow melt from the Himalayas as well seasonal monsoons. How can villages in Bangladesh get health care if they don’t have a boat to transport them to regional health care centers? The answer–according to a recent article in The Economist–is that the hospital comes to them. Three hours’…

Quality Measurement of German Hospitals

Public reporting of hospital quality of care could improve the care patients receive through at least two pathways. First, patients (or their physicians) could send patients to higher quality hospitals (i.e., the selection pathway). Alternatively, hospitals themselves could have behavioral responses to the metrics and may improve quality of care in response to public reporting…

Hospital finances in 2022: Outlook is grim

Based on some recent reports, hospital finances in 2022 look poor. Government cash infusions from COVID-19 were helpful during the pandemic but have largely disappeared. At the same time, costs for labor and supplies have risen. Adding on to these financial pressures is the recent rise in the number of RSV cases. According to a…

Impact of hospital closures on rural economies

Not surprisingly, the impact is significant. That is according to a study by Malone et al. (2022), estimated using a difference-in-difference design with data between 2001 and 2018. Specifically, they find: Of the 1759 nonmetro counties in our study sample, 109 experienced a hospital closure during the study period. Relative to the nonclosure counterfactual, closures…

340B Court Cases

The Public Health Service Act (PHSA) in 1992, created a program to allow hospitals providing care for underserved communities to be able to access discounted drugs. The program–known as the 340B Drug Pricing Program, has been described as follows: …[The] law requires pharmaceutical manufacturers participating in the Medicaid program to enter into a second agreement…