The Tri-State Pain Institute has filed for chapter 11 protection as it faces a $1.7 million debt that could have led to the repossession of the clinic’s medical equipment, GoErie.com reported. The pain institute is also under the mounting threat of lawsuits stemming from a 2017 MRSA outbreak that state and county health officials linked to injection practices at the clinic. Tri-State Pain Institute will be able to remain open while the bankruptcy proceedings take place. The petition, filed on Thursday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Erie, reveals deep financial troubles at the pain institute, including $6 million in debt to Wells Fargo for equipment and inventory. The petition estimates the business’s assets at between $500,000 and $1 million; its debts are estimated to be between $1 million and $10 million. The pain institute was projected to bring in more than $5 million in 2019 and about the same amount in 2020, according to motions filed with the petition. The clinic employs 27 people, according to the motions.
John Gallagher said that he and other Astria Health executives went “pretty much right to the end” in trying to prevent the closure of Astria Regional Medical Center in Yakima, Wash., the Yakima Herald-Republic reported. “The other two hospitals in the company (Astria Toppenish and Astria Sunnyside) continue to improve and produce revenue that we used for the last 28 months to support Yakima,” said Gallagher, CEO of both Astria Health and Astria Regional, during a bankruptcy court hearing on Tuesday. “It is to the point that if we didn’t do something else, we could have three failing hospitals.” The hearing on Tuesday came a day after Astria Regional’s emergency department closed its doors. During his testimony, Gallagher said that the last patients were transferred to other facilities Monday and the organization had started the process of relinquishing Regional’s license with the Department of Health. Read more.
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Reva Medical announced yesterday that it has filed for chapter 11 protection, MassDevice.com reported. Last month, San Diego-based Reva entered into a restructuring support agreement with a handful of its stakeholders to address the company’s outstanding debt. Reva also filed a pre-packaged reorganization plan to provide employee wages and benefits without interruption while paying vendors and suppliers as usual, with court approval. Reva also plans to continue ordinary operations and expects to use provisions in the Bankruptcy Code that require suppliers to meet the terms of pre-existing contracts. The company said that it secured pre-petition financing worth $4.4 million to help it reach its near-term financial commitments.
Seton Medical Center, the 127-year-old Daly City, Calif., hospital, was on the verge of potential closure after a deal to buy the hospital from its bankrupt owner fell apart last month. Now it’s in talks to be sold to another buyer, according to the president of the hospital’s medical staff, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Seton and Seton Coastside, a smaller affiliated facility in Moss Beach, may soon be acquired by Apollo Medical Holdings and AHMC Healthcare, a Southern California health management company, said Dr. Robert Perez, who oversees the hospital’s physicians and is knowledgeable about the discussions. Verity Health System, Seton’s current owner, declined to say whether it is talking to prospective buyers, saying only that it is “actively working on many options.” Apollo did not immediately return a request for comment. A deal could take several weeks to close and would have to be approved by the judge overseeing bankruptcy proceedings for Verity, which filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018. Seton, which serves many low-income and elderly patients — and is Daly City’s largest employer, with 1,200 employees and 350 doctors and nurse practitioners — was at risk of closing within two months if another potential buyer had not come forward, Perez said.
A West Virginia hospital system announced on Friday that it is filing for chapter 11 protection, but assured that it is not closing its doors, the Associated Press reported. In West Virginia, other hospitals have closed in Bluefield, Richwood and Wheeling. Williamson Memorial Hospital filed for bankruptcy in October. Thomas Health is not closing its doors and there are no planned changes to employment, services, or how we deliver care to our patients,” according to a company statement. The nonprofit system includes Thomas Memorial Hospital in South Charleston, Saint Francis Hospital in Charleston, and THS Physician Partners Inc. The system cited several financial challenges it said are largely beyond its control. Commercially insured patients are significantly decreasing in the state; many patients can’t afford deductibles; Medicaid, Medicare and the Public Employees Insurance Agency are reimbursing below cost; and substance-use disorder treatment costs often exceed reimbursement, it said.
The health system has a combined 383 beds, about 1,800 employees and 450 physicians. Early last year, WorkForce West Virginia listed Thomas Health as the 18th largest employer in the state.
A quiet crisis is unfolding for U.S. hospitals, with bankruptcies and closures threatening to leave some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens without care, Bloomberg reported. As a gauge of distress in the health care sector has soared, at least 30 hospitals entered bankruptcy in 2019. They range from Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia to De Queen Medical Center in Sevier County, Ark., and Americore Health LLC, a company built on preserving rural hospitals. There’s more distress to come. Already this week, the bankrupt owner of St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles said it plans to shut the facility after a failed sale attempt. Americans are fleeing rural areas in favor of urban centers, reducing the demand for hospital services in already struggling communities. In both cities and towns, many hospitals that care for impoverished citizens often rely heavily on government payments that reimburse less than private insurers and may fail to cover rising costs. The American Hospital Association calculated that payments from Medicare and Medicaid lagged costs by $76.6 billion in 2018. Hospitals are also losing key income as more profitable procedures move to lower-cost outpatient centers. If that weren’t enough, with both Republicans and Democrats making a political football out of health care ahead of the 2020 presidential election, significant policy change could be near. “How are you supposed to craft a business plan if you don’t know if you’re going to have an America with Medicare for all, or a complete repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or a million options in the middle?” said Samuel R. Maizel, a partner with the Dentons US LLP. “If you knew Elizabeth Warren was going to get elected, you’d be writing a very different business plan.” Even before the election, the current system is being challenged. The Trump administration is trying to tighten eligibility rules for Medicaid, while a rule proposed late last year could also cut billions of dollars in supplemental payments to hospitals. In a closely watched case, a district judge in Fort Worth, Texas, is weighing whether Obamacare can survive after an appeals court ruled that its broad mandate requiring people to have health insurance was unconstitutional. The usual playbook for managing distress doesn’t readily apply, as shutting down a hospital isn’t the same as boarding up a storefront.
Researchers thought they had a way to keep hard-to-treat patients from constantly returning to the hospital and racking up big medical bills, the Associated Press reported. Health workers visited homes, went along to doctor appointments, made sure medicines were available and tackled social problems including homelessness, addiction and mental health issues. Readmissions seemed to drop. The program looked so promising that the federal government and the MacArthur Foundation gave big bucks to expand it beyond Camden, New Jersey, where it started. But a more robust study revealed that it was a stunning failure on its main goal: Readmission rates did decline, but by the same amount as for a comparison group of similar patients not in the costly program. “There’s [a] real concern that the response to this would be to just throw up our arms” and say nothing can be done to help these so-called frequent fliers of the medical system, said study leader Amy Finkelstein. Instead, researchers need to seek better solutions and test them as rigorously as new drugs, said Finkelstein, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Just 5 percent of the U.S. population accounts for half of health care spending, and hospitalization is a big part. The study enrolled 800 hospitalized patients with at least two other admissions in the previous six months and at least two of these conditions: homelessness, drug use, a mental health problem, trouble accessing services, lack of social support or use of five or more medicines. Six months later, the readmission rate was 62 percent, and there was no difference in total health care spending.
Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton say that America’s high health-care costs are so far above what people pay in other countries that they are the equivalent of a hefty tax, the Washington Post reported. They are surprised Americans aren’t revolting against these taxes. The U.S. health-care system is the most expensive in the world, costing about $1 trillion more per year than the next-most-expensive system — Switzerland’s. That means U.S. households pay an extra $8,000 per year, compared with what Swiss families pay. Case and Deaton view this extra cost as a “poll tax,” meaning it is levied on every individual regardless of their ability to pay. Despite paying $8,000 more a year than anyone else, American families do not have better health outcomes, the economists argue. Life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than in Europe.
