In brief: Hospitals v. pharmacies in court, lights on at all-electric hospital, money-minded nonprofits, more
Last September more than two dozen Florida hospitals filed suit against CVS, Walmart and Walgreens. The hospitals said the retailers were largely to blame for the ballooning of the Sunshine State’s opioid abuse epidemic. By wrongly dispensing the drugs in mass quantities, the plaintiffs charged, the pharmacy operators had not only harmed many individual patients but also cost the hospitals dearly. They said they’d spent hundreds of millions of dollars treating uninsured patients for opioid-related injuries.
- This week a judge declared the case a mistrial. The Dec. 8 decision will allow the complainants to re-file their suit. Their attorney quickly pledged to do just that, although it’s not clear whether the hospitals will again accuse the defendants of violating Florida’s racketeering, or RICO, statute—as they did this time.
- The judge branded the trial invalid after jurors said they could not reach a unanimous verdict. By then they’d been deliberating for two weeks, according to Reuters.
- The suit as written shows that, between 2006 and 2018, the pharmacies doled out at least 21 billion opioid pills in 15 Florida counties served by the hospitals. That amounts to almost 200 pills a year for every resident.
- The hospitals maintain they were left holding the bag on $528.3 million in unpaid bills for treating opioid-related injuries, Reuters reports, and another $1.5 billion when patients with opioid-related conditions sought care for other issues.
- Walmart attorney David Markus called the lawsuit a “money grab,” according to the news service, saying the hospitals’ damages calculations “included cases where bills were fully paid and even instances where the hospitals’ own physicians prescribed opioids.” Markus then stated flatly: “There was no conspiracy.”
Nonprofit hospitals could take a bite out of rising coverage costs by taking one brave step: getting transparent with their executives’ compensation. Meanwhile, the general public could “pressure companies to put greater weight on affordability and quality of care when setting performance targets for nonprofit hospital executives.” This is the proposal of two researchers at Rice University who have analyzed concurrent trends in employer-sponsored insurance premiums and the Consumer Price Index.
- Reporting their findings in JAMA Network Open, Salpy Kanimian, MA, and Vivian Ho, PhD, show that insurance premiums have increased at three times the rate of workers’ earnings since 1999. This rise has been “accompanied by” escalating hospital prices, they note. “Health insurance prices increased at rates close to hospital prices during the COVID-19 pandemic but have since stabilized,” Kanimian and Ho write. “This volatility reflects both pandemic-era shifts in healthcare utilization (eg, limited clinician visits) and higher retained earnings for insurers. As utilization normalized and CPI updates took effect, the index dropped.”
- Discussing their study at TheConversation.com, the authors train their eyes on a certain class of provider organization. “The mission statements of the largest nonprofit health care systems in the U.S. often express a desire to improve the health of the communities they serve, especially the most vulnerable,” Kanimian and Ho point out. “Restraining price growth among nonprofit hospitals would introduce greater price competition to the healthcare market, likely forcing for-profit providers to lower their prices as well.”
A new hospital in Southern California is about to become the largest in the country intended to operate on electricity only. UCI Health–Irvine will open Dec. 10 with 144 beds and feature patient rooms with “natural light and quiet alarms,” according to the institution’s overview. But wait. Isn’t the Golden State prone to power outages, planned as well as unexpected?
- “Blackouts are bad for everyone, but they are unacceptable for hospitals. If an emergency facility loses power, people die,” the Los Angeles Times points out in its coverage of the opening. The newspaper reports that, as part of its contingency planning, UCI Health–Irvine has positioned four 3-megawatt diesel generators on the roof of the facility’s central utility plant. And under the ground are tanks holding 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel in storage.
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Fire Protection Association have codes that require testing the generators once a month at 30% power for half an hour, Joe Brothman, director of general services, tells the daily. “The emissions from burning that diesel are real, he concedes. But ‘it’s not something that you want to mess around with.’”
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Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.