By the Numbers

Healthcare headlines

8 — Percentage of gain for hospital stocks in 2010, according to a USA Today report. Hospitals joined pharmacy benefit managers and dialysis among sectors that outperformed the markets. For the upcoming fourth-quarter results, research firm Thomson Reuters expects earnings growth of 5.6% from health care companies, the lowest growth seen since the 4% gain recorded for the third quarter of 2009.

50 – HealthGrades released its first-ever list of America’s Top 50 Cities for Hospital Care. The Top 50 Cities for Hospital Care list is part of HealthGrades Hospital Quality and Clinical Excellence study. As part of the study, HealthGrades identified those hospitals performing in the top 5% nationwide across 26 different medical procedures and diagnoses, then ranked cities by highest percentage of these Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence™. The top 10 were as follows

1. West Palm Beach, FL
2. Brownsville, TX
3. Dayton, OH
4. Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
5. Tucson, AZ
6. Cincinnati, OH
7. Phoenix AZ
8. Greenville, SC
9. Chattanooga, TN
10. Richmond, VA

 

$4 billion  Federal officials recovered $4 billion in taxpayer funds due to fraud and prevention efforts in FY 2010. It is the most that has ever been recovered. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Washington, DC) secretary Kathleen Sebelius credited the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act with providing new legal tools to help in the recovery of fraud, abuse and waste of federal healthcare dollars. These new tools included enhanced provider eligibility screening and Medicare and Medicaid program enrollment requirements, increased data sharing across government agencies, expanded overpayment recovery efforts and greater oversight of abuses by private insurance companies.

$300 Million. Arizona hospitals want to assess a $300 million bed tax on themselves rather than lose out on Medicaid payments that would be eliminated by proposed state budget cuts, according to the Arizona Republic.

2014 — What’s in the law: U.S. citizens and legal residents are required to have health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty. How Republicans could take a scalpel to this measure and more in the healthcare reform legislation.