Anthony Brino
Assurant, one of the most profitable home and life insurers, is advancing its plans to leave the health insurance business and sell off a subsidiary in an attempt to cut its losses on the sector.
The 25-bed Cochise Regional Hospital in Douglas, Arizona, is set to close at the end of July, after Medicare took the rare action of cutting off funding based on findings from several compliance and safety investigations.
Medicare and the healthcare system it helped create has led to a situation where healthcare companies, particularly hospitals, offer a reliable source of middle class employment but also consume larger-than-desired public and private budgets that threaten to crowd out investments in education, infrastructure and housing.
Medicare coverage at 50 would be a major incentive to move the rest of the U.S. healthcare system into the prevention business, which is already occurring.
As patients, consumers, governments and the media are all following the money in healthcare, more scrutiny than ever is falling on executive compensation, especially for nonprofit systems and health insurers.
The insurer's rise, fall and later rebound poses a cautionary tale in today's consolidating healthcare market. And some of the strategies behind Aetna's $37 billion takeover of Humana invoke themes from the failed 1990s-era HMO empire.
Medicare Trustees are projecting that the program's trust fund for hospital insurance coverage will remain solvent until 2030, unchanged from last year, and 13 years longer than the Trustees projected in 2009, before the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Though new transparency rules worried dialysis providers and prevention efforts are increasing, DaVita HealthCare Partners says the demand for the kidney-care services is still driving business forward.
Humana and HCA have come to a resolution, for the time being at least. It's not clear what Aetna's takeover bodes for Florida hospitals.
The Portland-based company is making one of the most audacious forays into healthcare based on a vision of highly personalized, and tech-centered patient-centered healthcare.