Hospitals

Morning Read: Congress to keep pressure on nonprofit hospitals

Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare: Congress  to keep […]

Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:

Congress  to keep pressure on nonprofit hospitals: Whether or not you think nonprofit hospitals should be held to strict standards about the amount of charity care they provide, we can all  be happy that the issue has provided some much needed bipartisanship in Washington, D.C. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, make for “strange bedfellows” as they aim  to  ensure that tax-exempt hospitals treat patients without insurance, The Hill reports. Scrutinizing the tax-exempt status of nonprofit hospitals has long been an area of major interest for Grassley, but Rush is new to the game. He became involved after discovering that a hospital in his Chicago-area district refused to care for uninsured or poor patients.

The new health reform law requires the IRS to conduct stricter oversight on tax-exempt hospitals, but Grassley and Rush say the provisions don’t go far enough to ensure that hospitals provide adequate charity care. Further, Grassley rightly questions the definition of charity care, since hospitals have every incentive to define the term as widely as possible. What we don’t know yet is what, if anything, will come out of the unlikely  Grassley-Rush pairing: “Work on the issue is being done at the staff level, and specifics about how the lawmakers will work together has not yet been determined,” according to The Hill.

Beware of “food fraud”: Add another item to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s to-do list: Crack down on “food fraud.” That’s the practice of deceptively marketing food, or in other words, claiming a food product is something that it isn’t, such as selling cow’s milk but claiming it’s more expensive sheep’s milk, for example. It’s an ages-old and widespread practice. One analyst estimates the issue affects 5 to 7 percent of the nation’s food supply, and those numbers may actually be larger, the Washington Post reports. Some critics argue the FDA hasn’t been doing a very good job of fulfilling its police duties when it comes to food fraud, and that brings economic and food-safety concerns.

New high-tech tools like DNA testing have made detection cheaper and easier, but that doesn’t seem to have prompted much action from the FDA. Since 1991, olive oil suppliers have been urging the agency to set standards that would allow them to sue competitors for selling “an adulterated product,” the Post reports. But it sounds like the industry’s request has largely gone unheeded.

“If it’s not going to hurt or kill someone, FDA’s resources are limited enough that they can’t take time to address it,” said a spokesman for the North American Olive Oil Association.

Patient-safety problems persist: An annual survey from Healthgrades shows that patient-safety problems continue to plague  hospitals, and, more disturbingly, the numbers haven’t improved in recent years. Nearly one million patient-safety incidents happened among Medicare patients between the years of 2006 and 2008, with nearly one-in-ten of those patients dying as a result. Healthgrades put the cost of those incidents at nearly $9 billion. “It is disheartening to see that the numbers have not changed since last year’s study and, in fact, certain patient-safety incidents, such as post-operative sepsis, are on the rise,” said one of the study’s authors.

Cash for kidneys: In a study that raises all sorts of ethical questions, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that, not surprisingly, paying people for living kidney donations would increase the supply of the organs. More surprisingly, the possibility of payment didn’t influence low-income people any more than high-income people in their decisions. While some might find the idea of paying for kidneys distasteful, tell that to the families of the nearly 4,500 people who died last while waiting for a kidney transplant. This is likely an ethical dilemma that will take years, if not decades, to sort out.

Photo from flickr user taberandrew

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