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Florida House’s ambitious healthcare package

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The Florida House has passed a healthcare package that, as nicely summarized by The Miami Herald:

  • Sets rules for telemedicine that let out-of-state physicians use technology to serve patients in Florida.
  • Lets  people contract directly with physicians to pay for primary care without involving insurance companies. Those choosing this option would still need to have some  health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
  • Giving advanced registered nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants the right to prescribe narcotics and other drugs.
  • Creating new recovery centers that can care for patients for 72 hours after surgery and extending the time  that patients can stay at ambulatory surgical centers to 24 hours.
  • Sets sweeping price-transparency requirements to ease patients’ shopping for non-emergency coverage.
  • Creates new recovery centers that can care for patients for 72 hours after surgery and extends the time patients can stay at ambulatory surgical centers to 24 hours.
  • Seeks to to protect consumers from “balance billing,” in which physicians directly bill patients for services not covered by insurance, which often happens when hospitals contract with outside physicians.


Healthcare hiring to increase — except at hospitals

 

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Modern Healthcare reports in this useful, if  with  rather predictable findings, tour d’horizon that hiring will pick up in the U.S healthcare sector this year — except in hospitals.

It reports:

“The outlook for growth in hospital employment—healthcare’s largest employer—is modest at best. Many hospitals will be reducing head counts. Others are holding the line on adding new employees since the federal government plans to keep a tight rein on reimbursement while private insurers are pushing more participation in risk-based contracts. ”
“Hiring at outpatient facilities and ambulatory surgical centers, on the other hand, is expected to continue its rapid growth as technological changes and financial pressures push the locus of care from inpatient to outpatient settings.”

And, it said:  {F}inancial pressures on hospitals will {continue to} shift their recruitment focus to finding skilled nurses and primary-care physicians.”

The hunt for the latter might fade a bit as more nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants take on more and more primary-care jobs in coming years After all,  an increasing number of states are now letting NP’s and PA’s do things once restricted to physicians. New York State, for one, just did this.

 

 


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