DL Open Thread: Saturday, November 23, 2024
Hospital Lobbyists Try To Kill Diamond State Cost Review Board. Carney said he supports it–but will he appoint the members?:
With about two months until a new executive administration takes over in the First State, Delaware Healthcare Association president and CEO Brian Frazee penned a letter Wednesday urging term-limited Gov. John Carney to defer making appointments to the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board.
The controversial proposal to establish an oversight body with hopes to control Delaware’s rising health care costs became law June 13, one month after the Delaware Healthcare Association changed its opposing stance on the bill to neutral once compromises were struck between hospital chiefs and Democratic leaders.
Because ChristianaCare has gone to court to stop the legislation they allegedly compromised on. No shock that lobbyists ‘compromise’, then go back to kill the compromise they agreed to. There’s more:
Throughout the bill’s legislative journey, the Delaware Healthcare Association represented the interests of hospitals such as ChristianaCare, Bayhealth, Beebe Healthcare and TidalHealth Nanticoke.
In addition to Mr. Frazee, those facilities’ leaders spoke out against the bill during its path in the General Assembly because of it being a politically controlled board charged with overseeing and approving hospitals’ annual budgets. Though a compromise was struck, leaders were steadfast in their uneasiness toward certain aspects of the bill.
Gov. Carney praised the measure for its ability to potentially decrease health care spending in the state.
“Rising health care costs are having a significant impact on Delaware families and state taxpayers,” Gov. Carney said after the bill was passed May 21. “House Bill 350 will help lower the growth of health care costs in our state, while making sure we’re protecting health care quality and access.”
BTW, Dr. Bryan Haimes, one of the two ChristianaCare candidates in the SD 5 race, either doesn’t understand, or misrepresents, the legislation:
(Dr. Bryan) Haimes, a ChristianaCare doctor, also opposes a hospital cost review board. He said tying hospital prices to Medicare reimbursement rates would harm care. Instead, he called for the state to push for better access to primary care doctors.
Uh, doctor? The bill doesn’t do that:
The amendment included the agreed-upon compromises between stakeholders, which included requiring the board to have geographical equity in the state, clarifying the financial information submitted by hospitals and replacing a controversial Medicare reference pricing clause with a relaxed provision based on core consumer price index.
Regardless of how this turns out, I at least think that candidates who are carrying water for Christiana Care should be kept as far away from the General Assembly as possible. Especially now.
Meta Vs. ‘Pig-Butchering’. Yet another scam born out of social media:
Meta said Thursday that it removed more than 2 million accounts this year that sought to trick internet users around the world into forking over their money in fake investment schemes, part of a rise in criminal activity across the web.
The accounts are linked to so-called pig butchering schemes, in which criminal organizations make up fake personas — often posting as attractive single people or trusted public figures — to win the confidence of users, eventually persuading these contacts to fork over money for nonexistent investments.
“Every day, criminals target people across the world through text messaging, dating apps, social media and email in so-called ‘pig-butchering’ schemes that try to con them into scam investments,” the company said in a press release.
The scam centers running “pig-butchering” schemes took off in Asia during the covid-19 pandemic, often recruiting their workers with “too-good-to-be-true job postings” on local job boards and then forcing them to work as online scammers under the threat of physical abuse, according to Meta’s report.
They had me at ‘pig-butchering’.
BTW, this blog is as social as my social media gets. But Bluesky sounds interesting. Anybody on the platform? Whaddayathink?
Trump Plans DOJ Probe Of–2020 Election? Who am I to warn him about doing this?:
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump plans to assemble investigative teams at the Department of Justice to search for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing a source.Trump, who won the 2024 election but lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, has falsely claimed that he lost the 2020 election due to extensive voter fraud, a view shared by millions of his supporters.
I never signed up for Twitter, so I probably won’t sign up for Bluesky, but here’s what I know.
Bluesky is designed to be a federated service, which means anyone can operate a Bluesky hosting node and offer Bluesky accounts to users, as long as they follow the technical protocol (unlike Twitter, which is controlled by a single entity). You can even operate your own Bluesky node from a server in your basement if you want. Once you are on a node, you can communicate with users in any other node.
Being federated means there can be many nodes owned by different people, which theoretically makes it billionaire-proof. Unfortunately, Bluesky has not yet enabled “federation” ability. There is currently only one node – the node offered by Bluesky. Hopefully they will open up federation soon.
Mastodon is a true federated service with many nodes. Prospective users were interested but became confused by the signup options which required you to select a node, so they walked away. So there’s not a lot of users on Mastodon.
Federation is kind of like email. If you want an email account, you don’t have to sign up with “email.com.” There are many providers who can give you an email account that will allow you to send/receive with any other email account, regardless of who their provider is.
Oh and forget about privacy with Bluesky. It has an unencrypted API, which means that all your posts can be read on the Internet, even without a Bluesky account, by anyone with modest programming skills. Which I don’t mind, because you should always assume anything you post on the Internet can be read publicly.
I also read that it’s ’employee-owned’, which was one reason it interested me.
I have never seen that Bluesky is employee owned, more like venture-capital funded. Here’s part 1 of a thread on Bluesky’s operating system (so to speak) vs the Fediverse, which is a bunch of different services that share messaging protocols, no single entity owns all the parts:
https://taggart-tech.com/20241124-bluesky-questions-pt1/
A lot of these articles get into the weeds pretty fast.
I can recommend mastodon.sdf.org as a place to park in the fediverse. Well-run, longstanding instance with interesting members, lots of musicians.
You can interact via web browser or use an app — I use Trunks for android.
ChristianaCare’s arguments are even more absurd — as are a certain candidates — when you take into account that they purchased a hospital in Maryland already subject to hospital global budgeting. As far as we know – and perhaps research is in order – they already comply with a set-budget system!! The same for our Sussex/Maryland hospital relationships. Few people pointed this out, I don’t know why.
But now you know why I’m cautious about Kam, even if that win is commendable.
Adding – I recently heard that Chair of the Delaware Health Care Commission under Carney, who also chairs the Primary Care Reform Collaborative, is stepping down. People didn’t seem to ask why, I suppose they assumed it was related to Carney’s term and the length of service she had already done. Perhaps it is in order to be appointed to the Hospital Board. I think Nancy Fan practices at St. Francis, which I think based on the hearings on the bill would serve to benefit from it because they’re not profit machines like the others (or would have benefitted if they kept the Medicare-tied component, perhaps)
Seventeen states have some form of oversight over hospitals through boards of this type. They all operate differently, as they were started for various reasons. But state-funded health care for employees and retirees is usually one of the drivers. Those pushing for one in Delaware say they are modeling Vermont’s.
I would argue it’s really the only driver, because individuals are not going to be able to afford a $200,000 hospital bill any better than a $250,000 hospital bill. The notion that this will have a positive impact on individuals is laughable.
This study from 10 years ago offers a history of the Maryland program to that point, starting on page 12.
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/73841/2000516-Hospital-Rate-Setting-Revisited.pdf