Corruption at the Veterans Administration Hospital….A model for ObamaCare!

I receive my care from the VA, and I like all I have met at the various VAs where I have received that treatment. Having said that the VA needs to prosecute these people to the fullest extent possible. I fear that ObamaCare will enable Bureaucrats the ability to break the law (hell….Obamacare will allow these Bureaucrats to make the law) without fear of prosecution! Just let a for-profit hospital try this and Eric Holder would have them up on charges in no time!

 

Drugs, corruption go unpunished in Mississippi VA center

7:29 PM 03/19/2014

Michael Volpe

A number of top level managers at the G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson, Miss. remain employed in their positions or in other positions within the Veterans Administration despite an Office of Special Counsel report from 2013 that implicated each in criminal wrongdoing, The Daily Caller has learned.

A 22-page letter from Office of Special Counsel (OSC) investigator Carolyn Lerner from September 13, 2013 implicated several members in the criminal wrongdoing: Joe Battle, the director of the Sonny Montgomery Medical Center; Dr. Kent Kirchner, the chief operating officer; Dr. James Lockyer, the head of Primary Care; and Dorothy White-Taylor, the former associate director of patient care. The letter, addressed to President Barack Obama, also implicated Dr. Gregg Parker, the chief medical officer for Veteran Integration Services Network 16, which oversees a basket of hospitals including the Sonny Montgomery Medical Center.

The report stated that many of the problems stemmed from the hospital’s reliance on nurse practitioners at the expense of doctors, largely at the behest of Dorothy White-Taylor.

According to the report, there were “numerous issues regarding patient safety, provision of services, and certification of medical providers.” Specifically, Drs. Kirchner and Lockyer were implicated in the report for prescribing medication to patients they didn’t treat.

“Dr. Kirchner and Dr. Lockyer commonly signed the form [to prescribe narcotics] as the certifying physician even though providing patient care was never a part of their duties.”

The report also implicated Battle and Dr. Parker for pressuring doctors at the Sonny Montgomery Medical Center to sign a collaborative agreement with nurse practitioners (NPs), even though the doctors weren’t in a position to supervise the NPs, and could be subject to malpractice suits if the NPs committed a medical error. According to the report, when some doctors resisted signing these collaborative agreements, Battle and Dr. Parker threatened to withhold part of their paychecks.

Additionally, the report cited a series of emails from Dorothy “Dot” Taylor-White to medical staff encouraging doctors to sign off for narcotics prescriptions for patients seen by NPs, a criminal act according to one of the whistleblowers, Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck. The report further stated that Taylor’s power and clout in the hospital caused doctors to be fearful of reporting this misdeeds.

“Dr. Hollenbeck further stated physicians were ignored when they raised concerns about NPs practicing as [licensed independent practitioners] LIPs, because NPs and Ms. White-Taylor had significant power in the facility, such that physicians feared retaliation,” the report reads.

The problems at the Sonny Montgomery Medical Center have been the subject of two House Veteran Affairs Committee (HVAC) hearings, in September and November 2013, along with the OSC report. Despite all this oversight, no one has been held to account, said whistleblowers Dr. Hollenbeck and Erik Heaton, a military veteran who served for more than 40 years.

Battle continues to be the director of the Sonny Montgomery Medical Center. Dr. Lockyer was transferred to the Mountain Home, Tennessee VA Medical Center, where he is currently a physician. Dr. Parker continues to be the chief medical officer of the region. Only Dot Taylor is no longer with the VA system.

Taylor was arrested on drug charges in early 2012, before the events in the OSC report, only to have those charges dropped in March 2013. Taylor was working in a managerial role at the Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) regional office until she retired on March 7, 2014, and her final salary was $163,574, according to VISN 16 public affairs officer Benita McClellan .

A phone call and email to the media department at the VA wasn’t returned, and an email to VA Secretary General Eric Shinseki was also not answered.

In the September 2013 HVAC hearing, VISN 16 Director Rica Lewis-Payton, who oversees the Sonny Montgomery Medical Center, defended the region and stressed that accountability was a priority.

“Be assured that we have thoroughly investigated various allegations,” Lewis-Payton said. “We know that a number of issues have been raised about this center, and we take those concerns seriously. We work aggressively to identify and correct any errors, and we are adopting a series of significant reforms to improve the center. When appropriate to do so, we hold people accountable.”

Obamacare closing Hospitals due to low Emergency Rooms Reimbursements

We all know that Primary Care Givers are not going to lose money by seeing Obamacare insured patients! So here’s what the Family Practice, Internal Medicine, and mid-Levels will do when you contact them with an off hours illness….They will send you to the Emergency Room. The hospital will now eat the loss.

Obamacare Could Cause Iowa Hospitals To Close Their Doors

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
February 4, 2014 8:54 am

Doctors at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics are worried that Obamacare will cause hospitals to close their doors.

Dr. Hans House, Board Member for the American College Emergency Physicians, told KGAN-IOW, that if patients call their family doctor with an acute problem, the family doctor will refer them to the ER, four out of five times.

A massive influx of patients at emergency rooms because of Obamacare could cause long wait times and possibly force hospitals to close.

Obamacare closes another hospital...Next is the hospital near you!

If it happened there! It can happen in the hospital near your home as well! Obamacare closing hospitals, causing unemployment, and killing patients that now have to travel great distances to receive care!

Fourth Georgia hospital closes due to Obamacare payment cuts

Sarah Hurtubise from the Daily Caller

02/19/2014

The fourth Georgia hospital in two years is closing its doors due to severe financial difficulties caused by Obamacare’s payment cuts for emergency services.

The Lower Oconee Community Hospital is, for now, a critical access hospital in southeastern Georgia that holds 25 beds. The hospital is suffering from serious cash-flow problems, largely due to the area’s 23 percent uninsured population, and hopes to reopen as “some kind of urgent care center,” CEO Karen O’Neal said.

Many hospitals in the 25 states that rejected the Medicaid expansion are facing similar financial problems. Liberal administration ally Think Progress has already faulted Georgia for not expanding Medicaid as Obamacare envisioned.

But the reality is more complicated. The federal government has historically made payments to hospitals to cover the cost of uninsured patients seeking free medical care in emergency rooms, as federal law mandates that hospitals must care for all patients regardless of their ability to pay.

Because the Affordable Care Act’s authors believed they’d forced all states to implement the Medicaid expansion, Obamacare vastly cut hospital payments, the Associated Press reports.

The Supreme Court ruled that states could reject the Medicaid expansion in 2012, as part of the decision that upheld Obamacare generally. Since that decision, the Obama administration has so far instituted 28 unilateral delays and changes to the health care law’s implementation without congressional approval, Fox Business reports.

From verifying eligibility for subsidies to enforcing employer requirements, the Obama administration has already taken a hacksaw to the health care reform law, but it has made no changes to the provision raising problems for half the nation’s hospitals.

While the feds wait for financial pressure to force states to act, several state governments have been taking things into their own hands. Some have criticized these moves as “hospital bailouts.”

Once Obamacare is gone, and it will be going….the ACO approach will gain traction!

Now…All we have to do is cut out Malpractice lawyers! This approach will change the standard of care, and put the patient’s treatment in the hands of a team, and not a single physician!

 

Doctors Rush To Obamacare's Accountable Care Approach

Bruce Japsen Contributor

Pharma & Healthcare

Forbes 4/27/2013

The number of physicians participating in the emerging medical care delivery system known as “accountable care organizations” (ACOs) has tripled as the health care industry moves further away from fee-for-service medicine.

A new study from Medscape said one in four doctors, or 24 percent, “were either in an ACO or planned to be in an ACO within a year.” By comparison, only 8 percent of physicians in Medscape’s 2012 report were in or planning to be in an ACO. The report included more than 21,000 doctor respondents across 25 specialties.

“There’s a dramatic change in the number of physicians who are becoming involved in Accountable Care Organizations,” the report said. “The focus on ACOs as a care-delivery and cost-containment method is making an impact.”

ACOs, which reward doctors and hospitals for working together to improve quality and to control costs, need doctors to be a quarterback of sorts in using nurses and other caregivers to manage the medical-care of populations of patients.

ACOs link medical care providers together to improve quality. If the providers in the ACO achieve better outcomes, they divvy up money saved with the health plans.

“ACOs are being looked to as one of the tools for lowering the cost of healthcare,” said Leslie Kane, executive editor of Medscape Business of Medicine.

“ACOs can encompass new payment models for certain health conditions, such as bundled payments,” Kane added. “In a bundled payment, the ACO receives one set payment for a particular patient’s ‘episode of care.’   And whichever doctors see or perform services on that patient, they will all share in that set payment.”

The Medscape report is different than others of late in that it looked at physicians. A report earlier this year from consulting firm Oliver Wyman said the ACO approach is also gaining momentum among U.S. consumers, employers and insurers, saying more than half the U.S. population has access to ACOs.

ACOs last year began providing medical care services to seniors through contracts with the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly. In addition, most private health insurance companies, too, such as those operated by Aetna AET +0.23% (AET), Cigna CI +0.39% (CI), Humana HUM +0.56% (HUM), UnitedHealth Group UNH +1.09% (UNH), Wellpoint (WLP) as well as Blue Cross plans linking with ACOS to care for more patients.

Earlier this week, the New York Times followed up on a story the newspaper wrote about a year ago that featured an effort by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois that is achieving some success in how it pays a Chicago-based healthcare system. Advocate Health Care is reducing hospital admissions, the insurer and provider said.

A health plan contracts with doctors and hospitals through an ACO which pushes high quality, less expensive treatment rather than today’s payment system that often leads to excessive treatment by paying for each procedure that isn’t always necessarily better. The providers in an ACO are responsible for managing the care of the health plan enrollees and are financially rewarded if the enrollees, or patients, stay out of the more expensive hospital.

“Another reason the government is promoting them is that there is the strong hope that they will improve coordination of care for patients, so that it may cut down on duplication of tests, etc.,” Medscape’s Kane said. “There is also the opportunity with ACOs that if the organization comes in ‘under budget’ for its patient care, physicians will be able to share in the profits that are available. Many areas are racing to set up ACOs, and doctors feel that if they don’t get into them, they may get shut out of a potential patient pool.”

 

Obamacare excludes cancer patients from treatment! Ok…not today, but read about the United Kingdom’s Nationalized Healthcare!

UPDATE: Obamacare will not cover cancer patients who are age 75 and older! OK...not yet...but Obamacare is the first step to nationalized (read Universal) healthcare. So...I thought I would get ahead of the curve, and show you all what is happening in the United Kingdom! Think this won't happen under Obamacare...Think again smart-guy!

 

Too old to be given cancer treatment: NHS is 'writing off' patients who are over 75

• Young lung cancer sufferers are only 10 per cent more likely to die within five years than their continental counterparts
• But pensioners with the disease have 44 per cent less chance of survival
• The figure for stomach cancer – at 45 per cent – is even worse

By Jenny Hope

PUBLISHED: 19:20 EST, 23 January 2014 | UPDATED: 03:04 EST, 24 January 2014

Pensioners with cancer are being written off as too old to treat, campaigners said yesterday.

They cited figures showing survival rates for British patients aged 75 and over are among the worst in Europe.

Young lung cancer sufferers are only 10 per cent more likely to die within five years than their continental counterparts.

But pensioners with the disease have 44 per cent less chance of survival.

The figure for stomach cancer – at 45 per cent – is even worse.

And Britons with prostate cancer are a fifth less likely to survive than Europeans if they are 85 and over.

Just 43 per cent live for five years, compared with up to 67 per cent over the Channel. 

Patients in their 70s and 80s with kidney cancer have a 32 per cent survival rate, compared with 46-53 per cent in Europe.

Ciarán Devane, of Macmillan Cancer Support, which helped produce the figures, said: ‘It’s wrong to write off older people as too old for treatment. With a proper assessment and appropriate treatment, our research shows that many older cancer patients can live for a long time and can even be cured. 

‘While it’s good news that so many older people are benefiting from treatment, many thousands more could live longer if our survival rates for over 65s matched those in comparable countries.

 

The barriers to getting treatment – which include age discrimination and inadequate assessment methods – must be tackled now so more older people can survive cancer and live for many years.’

The research from Macmillan and the National Cancer Intelligence Network shows that more than 130,000 Britons have survived for at least ten years after being diagnosed with cancer at 65 or over.

The study, which is the first of its kind, also reveals there are more than 8,000 people alive today who have lived for the same time period following diagnosis at 80 or over.

Octogenarian women do particularly well, with twice as many surviving for ten or 20 years as men.

Survival rates for the over-75s are worse in Britain than Europe for nine out of ten common cancers.

A small survival advantage is seen for sufferers of melanoma skin cancer.

Caroline Abrahams, of the charity Age UK, said: ‘It’s good news that with the right care and treatment older people can survive for many years after cancer.

'It is often forgotten that people over 75 represent a third of all cancer diagnoses and a half of all cancer deaths. 

 

 ‘People over 80 with the disease are the only age group in which mortality rates have got worse in the last 40 years.

'An individual’s date of birth should not be used as a proxy for health and fitness or influence treatment decisions. 

‘Assessments of older people must be based on their needs and not simply on their age. Anything else is blatant age discrimination.’

Mark Porter, chairman of council at the British Medical Association, said: ‘It is important that all healthcare professionals ensure that patients are treated on the basis of clinical need.

‘With an increasingly ageing population, it should be a key part of medical professionalism to guarantee that older patients are treated with the care and respect they deserve.’

Around 60,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed each year in Britons aged 75 and over.

One in four are prostate sufferers. Gerald Shenton, 78, from Staffordshire, said: ‘I was first diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma in 2000, and I am still here 13 years later, although I’ve suffered from every side effect in the book.

‘I never really had any aftercare because I have always been treated as end stage. I was turned down for a possible treatment twice, being told unofficially that it was because of my age.’

Mick Peake, of the National Cancer Intelligence Network, said: ‘It is vital all patients receive the best and most effective treatment based on the nature of their cancer and their fitness for treatment and that chronological age alone is not the deciding factor.’

Canadians travel to the U.S. to receive Healthcare, but…..Where will Americans go once Obamacare is fully implemented?

Under Obamacare where will Americans go to receive medical care? Canadians come to the U.S. and under Obamacare this will end causing the loss of Millions of dollars to Canadian/U.S. boarder hospitals. Americans will turn to Medical tourism in Central American countries as American Health Systems begin to develop this industry!

Report: Tens of thousands fled socialized Canadian medicine in 2013

9:39 PM 01/16/2014 Michael Bastasch DC Caller

        

Every year thousands of Canadian have no choice but to seek medical care outside of the country’s single-payer health care system, according a report from a Canadian free-market think tank.

In 2013, nearly 42,000 Canucks left their homeland to avoid long wait times and inferior care that plagues their centralized health system.

The report from the free-market Fraser Institute found that 41,838 Canadians became “medical tourists” in 2013 and sought care outside of their hockey-loving country. While there were slightly fewer people fleeing the Canadian health system in 2013 than the previous year, the number leaving still amounts to nearly one percent of medical patients in Canada.

“Canadians may leave for a number of reasons including a lack of available resources or appropriate technology, a desire to return more quickly to their lives, to seek out superior quality care, or perhaps to save their own lives or avoid the risk of disability,” Nadeem Ismail, director of health policy studies at the Fraser Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“That a considerable number of Canadians traveled and paid to escape the well-known failings of the Canadian health care system speaks volumes about how well the system is working for them,” Ismail added.

Each year the Fraser Institute surveys physicians across 12 major medical specialties how many of their patients received non-emergency care abroad in the past year. The Institute then combines these numbers with data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

In 2013, 41,838 Canadians went outside the country to get medical treatment, down from 42,173 people leaving the country in 2012. This is interesting since wait times for patients who had consulted with a specialist till the time they got actual treatment increase from 9.3 weeks in 2012 to 9.6 weeks in 2013.

According to the report, there are many reasons why someone would leave Canada to seek treatment. Including “because of a lack of available resources or the fact that some procedures or equipment are not provided in their home jurisdiction” as well as “concerns about quality, seeking out more advanced healthcare facilities, higher tech medicine, or better outcomes.”

A major problem with the Canadian health system is that people may have fled because of “the consequences of waiting for care such as worsening of their condition, poorer outcomes following treatment, disability or death. And some may have done so simply to avoid delay and to make a quicker return to their life.”

U.S. conservatives have often criticized th Canadian health system as being subpar compared to the American health system. But liberals point to the relatively low-cost, fair alternative to market-driven health care.
In fact, failed Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader recently argued that the Canadian system was even a better system than Obamacare.

“Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare. No health insurance system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer full medicare for all is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal,” Nader wrote.

Canadians, however, may not always be getting adequate care. Patients have had to suffer through long wait times and lack of specialized medical equipment, according to  the Fraser Institute.

“That a considerable number of Canadians traveled and paid to escape the well-known failings of the Canadian health-care system speaks volumes about how well the system is working for them,” the Fraser Institute says. “It leaves open the question of just how many more Canadians might choose medical tourism outside Canada if given the opportunity.”

Obamacare causes Americans to go broke and into debt!

Obamacare will be unaffordable, cause Obama’s insured to go into debt, increase healthcare’s overall costs, and in the end….less Americans will be insured!

ObamaCare’s four biggest lies

By Michael Gartland

January 5, 2014 | 7:47am  Thanks NY Post

President Obama’s famous vow — “If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan. Period.” — isn’t the only broken promise of ObamaCare.

Now that the Affordable Care Act has actually been in effect for a week, Americans are discovering more pitfalls associated with the massive overhaul.

Lie #1: “Affordable” Care. Even the president’s ideological allies — like Michael Moore — acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act is far from inexpensive for most Americans and that it “risks being a cruel joke.”

For average Americans, the results are prohibitively expensive. “The cheapest plan available to a 60-year-old couple making $65,000 a year in Hartford, Conn., will cost $11,800 in annual premiums,” according to Moore’s math, as published in a New York Times editorial. “If both become seriously ill, they might have to pay almost $25,000 in a single year.”

The National Federation of Independent Businesses, an organization that represents nearly 11,000 entrepreneurs in New York state alone, said it has yet to find a single member whose health-care costs are going down under ObamaCare. Instead, an “overwhelming majority” of businesses have reported increases in their insurance premiums, said Mike Durant, the NFIB’s New York director.

Lie #2: It will prevent people from going into debt.

Patients with cancer and conditions such as multiple sclerosis or Crohn’s disease can now get insurance and financial but if annual out-of-pocket costs run much higher than expected, they might have to go into debt.

“There are certainly challenges for cancer patients,” said Brian Rosen, a senior vice president of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. These gaps “need to be addressed in order to fulfill the intention of the Affordable Care Act.”

Caroline Pearson, who tracks the health-care overhaul for the consulting firm Avalere Health, put it in even starker terms.

“Chronically ill people are likely to be underinsured and face extremely high out-of-pocket costs,” she said. “While the subsidies help, there still may be access problems for some populations.”

Lie #3: ObamaCare will lower costs overall.

The idea that people with medical insurance go to the emergency room less, and thus, help to reduce the overall cost of health care, isn’t necessarily true, as a study of Oregon Medicaid recipients has shown.

Researchers compared Medicaid recipients with those with no health insurance and found the following: Pthat people with access to Medicaid went to the ER 40 percent more than those without insurance.

Lie #4: More Americans will be insured.

Approximately 2.8 million Americans have signed up for new health-care plans since the Affordable Care Act went into effect on Jan. 1. That’s less than the 3.3 million the federal government predicted would sign up, and is also dwarfed by the 4.7 million whose insurance policies have been cancelled as a result of the overhaul.