Ascension forms ‘global supply chain’ joint venture with Australia’s Ramsay

Ascension, the largest nonprofit health system in the U.S., has announced a new joint venture with Australia-based hospital operator Ramsay Health Care Limited to create a global supply chain to reduce costs for Ascension’s 2,600 sites of care and the more than 230 facilities Ramsay operates in six countries.

Tom Price, MD, was a major supporter of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), both in Congress and during his short tenure as President Donald Trump’s HHS Secretary. Since he left office, Republicans zeroed out the ACA penalty for not being insured, but Price said the move will increase premiums in the law’s health insurance exchanges.

Years of gains in insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are beginning to reverse, according to a new report from the Commonwealth Fund which found 15.5 percent of working age adults are uninsured, an increase of about four million people since 2016.

Median earned base-to-bonus ratio—measuring what proportion of compensation comes from incentives beyond base salary—rose for several job titles in 2017.

Maine became the first state to approve Medicaid expansion at the ballot box. Despite 59 percent of voters approved of expansion, Gov. Paul LePage has taken several steps which have stalled its implementation.

Envision had sued the insurer in March, alleging UnitedHealthcare “unilaterally” negotiated payment rates and failed to add Envision physicians to its network after the acquisition of AmSurg in 2016. UnitedHealthcare argued Envision’s emergency room billing practices were “egregious,” but also said the lawsuit itself was a violation of the arbitration provision in their contract.

Eleven months after the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) selected Cerner to replace its in-house electronic health record system, the $16 billion contract hasn’t been finalized. According to Politico, two men in the social circle of President Donald Trump may be to blame for holding up the project—and neither man officially works for his administration.

A report commissioned by the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association found it would cost the state’s hospitals nearly $1 billion a year to comply with a proposed ballot initiative to set limits on the number of patients a hospital can assign to a nurse per shift.