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Another sad tale of extreme profiteering in U.S. healthcare?

This is the sort of story that reminds Americans of just how profit-driven U.S. healthcare is and why it’s by far the most expensive in the world (but with mediocre outcomes compared to most Developed Nations). A  recent New York Times article begins:

“Early last year, executives at a small hospital an hour north of Spokane, Wash., started using a company called EmCare to staff and run their emergency room. The hospital had been struggling to find doctors to work in its E.R., and turning to EmCare  {part of publicly traded Envision Healthcare} was something hundreds of other hospitals across the country had done.

“That’s when the trouble began.

“Before EmCare, about 6 percent of patient visits in the hospital’s emergency room were billed for the most complex, expensive level of care. After EmCare arrived, nearly 28 percent got the highest-level billing code.

“On top of that, the hospital, Newport Hospital and Health Services, was getting calls from confused patients who had received surprisingly large bills from the emergency room doctors. Although the hospital had negotiated rates for its fees with many major health insurers, the EmCare physicians were not part of those networks and were sending high bills directly to the patients. For a patient needing care with the highest-level billing code, the hospital’s previous physicians had been charging $467; EmCare’s charged $1,649.”

To read The Time’s article, please hit this link.


Envision wants to be the ‘one throat to choke’

 

 

strangle

Envision Healthcare Corp.’s CEO, Chris Holden, says the company plans  to spend $700 million on acquisitions in 2017, mostly for physician practices that are lining up to be sold.

Speaking at the Citi Global Healthcare Conference, less than a week after Envision and AmSurg Corp. completed their $10 billion, all-stock merger,  Mr. Holden said  Envision has “a robust pipeline” from which to select practices to buy.

Modern Healthcare says the  merger “brought together Envision’s core of staffing emergency rooms and providing ambulance services with AmSurg’s focus on specialists, like anesthesiologists, radiologists and neonatal physicians, as well as ambulatory surgery centers.”

Holden told Citi analysts that hospitals seek one-stop vendors that can staff all of their departments and joked that hospital executives preferred to have  “one throat to choke” if there were problems.

He noted that independent physician groups seek partners,  such as as Envision, that can buy them and provide their practices with modern information technology and  other large-enterprise services  so  that the physicians can focus on clinical care,  especially with the ongoing payer shift from fee-for-service medicine to fee for value, which forces physicians to prove their quality and efficiency to optimize reimbursement.

To read the whole Modern Healthcare article, please hit this link.


AmSurg and Envision Healthcare in merger talks

 

The Wall Street Journal reports that AmSurg and Envision Healthcare Holdings are  in talks about a potential merger.

The WSJ said that such a transaction would create a company valued at more than $9 billion.

Nashville, Tenn.-based AmSurg provides physician-outsourcing services to hospitals and other healthcare organizations and runs more than 200 ambulatory surgical centers. Denver-based Envision provides outsourcing and medical transportation services.


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