TBD on Ning

but what the hell...let's blame obamacare....

so why have medical costs been going thru the roof? gee maybe things like this...which might be why some people never wanted a central agency that might stumble across their schemes...

Business Day

Hospital Chain Said to Scheme to Inflate Bills

By JULIE CRESWELL and REED ABELSONJAN. 23, 2014

Jacqueline Meyers says she was fired by a contractor after she refused to fire emergency room doctors who admitted fewer patients. Anne McQuary for The New York Times

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Every day the scorecards went up, where they could be seen by all of the hospital’s emergency room doctors.

Physicians hitting the target to admit at least half of the patients over 65 years old who entered the emergency department were color-coded green. The names of doctors who were close were yellow. Failing physicians were red.

The scorecards, according to one whistle-blower lawsuit, were just one of the many ways that Health Management Associates, a for-profit hospital chain based in Naples, Fla., kept tabs on an internal strategy that regulators and others say was intended to increase admissions, regardless of whether a patient needed hospital care, and pressure the doctors who worked at the hospital.

This month, the Justice Department said it had joined eight separate whistle-blower lawsuits against H.M.A. in six states. The lawsuits describe a wide-ranging strategy that is said to have relied on a mix of sophisticated software systems, financial incentives and threats in an attempt to inflate the company’s payments from Medicare and Medicaid by admitting patients like an infant whose temperature was a normal 98.7 degrees for a “fever.”

Gary D. Newsome, former H.M.A. chief.

The accusations reach all the way to the former chief executive’s office, whom many of the whistle-blowers point to as driving the strategy.

For H.M.A., the timing could not be worse. Shareholders recently approved the planned $7.6 billion acquisition of the company by Community Health Systems, which will create the nation’s second-largest for-profit hospital chain by revenue, with more than 200 facilities. The deal is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/business/hospital-chain-said-to-s...