Fred Schulte
Editor’s note: This is the second of two posts on covering private equity.
Lack of transparency is a giant hurdle in reporting on the growing influence of private equity in health care.
Reporters covering public corporations can easily obtain periodic financial reports and ownership disclosures that are filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Information about the finances and public benefits of nonprofit hospitals is readily available via the IRS’s Form 900.
Image by SalFlako via Flickr
Think the only big lawsuit pending on the Affordable Care Act is the Texas fight over whether the whole law is unconstitutional? Think again.
Several lawsuits are still working their way through the courts involving the unpaid cost-sharing reduction (CSR) subsidies, and risk corridor payments. Potentially, the Trump administration could be forced to pay insurers billions of dollars. (Paul Demko has reported on this extensively for Politico, and this post cribs shamelessly — but gratefully — from his knowledge.) Continue reading
In honor of Sunshine Week, AHCJ invited organizations devoted to government transparency to write about how their work can help health care reporters. Here is the second of four.
Public Citizen’s Health Research Group today released an updated report cataloging all major financial settlements that the pharmaceutical industry has been forced to sign with federal and state governments from 1991 through 2017 for illegal activities.
The report shows a dramatic decrease since 2013 in both the total amount paid and the average penalty. Additionally, it found that state governments have virtually stopped prosecuting pharmaceutical manufacturers on their own initiative and with their own resources. Continue reading
Photo by courtney0609 via Flickr.
Reporter Rachel Cook took a long and detailed look at the career of one Bakersfield, Calif., dentist and ended up with a series called “Dental Dangers,” recently published in The Bakersfield Californian.
The stories examine a history of complaints and lawsuits against Robert Tupac, who, as a board-certified prosthodontist, specializes in the restoration and replacement of teeth. Over three decades, more than a dozen of Tupac’s patients claimed his shoddy work left them with troubles ranging from bone loss to drooling, Cook wrote, and some patients reported that it would take thousands of dollars worth of corrective work to undo the harm.
In her reporting – done as a 2013 California Health Journalism Fellow – Cook described a state dental board system that allowed the alleged problems with the dentist to pile up outside public view. “A potential patient searching for competent dental care would never know about many of Tupac’s alleged professional shortcomings — or those of any other California dentist — without undertaking extensive and often difficult research,” Cook wrote. Continue reading
The election is over. Obamacare survived.
So what’s the story in your state or community?
Implementation. Or lack thereof.
Joanne Kenen (@JoanneKenen) is AHCJ’s health reform topic leader. If you have questions or suggestions for future resources, please send them to joanne@healthjournalism.org.So here’s an overview of where things stand in D.C. – and what it means for the health beat.
(Soon we will post a short separate item on the new state insurance exchange deadlines. If your state wants to run its own exchange, the deadline is still Nov. 16. They have more time to fill in the details though.)
The Affordable Care Act will not be repealed. Maybe the House will still hold a few symbolic repeal votes, but it’s not going to be repealed. That does not mean that critics of the law won’t try to dismantle parts of it. Some likely targets include the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board and some of the industry taxes, particularly the medical device tax. Watch your own legislators to see where they go on this—if you are in a state or district with a medical device industry, watch the Democrats as well as the Republicans (and the medical device businesses themselves). Ask them how they want to offset the funding; if they eliminate one of the taxes that paid for the coverage expansion, where do they want to get that money instead? Adding to the deficit isn’t going to go over as a solution.
The law’s funding is vulnerable. How vulnerable and which parts? Hard to say yet. But for what it’s worth, #DEFUND is the new Twitter rallying cry for opponents of the law (some of whom do not seem to realize that the Republican House can’t act unilaterally … but I digress). There will be ample opportunities for Republicans to try to take a whack at this, not just through the annual budget and appropriations process but through the lame duck session of Congress getting under way this week that will try to find a way of averting, at least temporarily, the fiscal cliff. Continue reading
