Medical Care Industry

Kaiser Permanente unveiled plans Thursday for a $10-million medical office building that will offer primary care, some specialty care and other services to 80,000 South Los Angeles residents who are members of Kaiser's healthcare plan. Kaiser's 15,000-square-foot South Los Angeles medical offices are expected to open in 2011 on the southeast corner of West Manchester and South Denker avenues. A vacant building on the site will be torn down to make way for the new facility. Construction is scheduled to begin soon.

Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday authorized health officials to negotiate nearly $100 million in contracts to help overhaul Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center during the hospital's downsizing, including up to $85 million to subsidize as many as 90 beds for county patients at nearby private hospitals. King/Drew, near Watts, is shifting specialty medical services and hospital management to Harbor/UCLA Medical Center near Torrance.

The federal investigation of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. expanded to Las Vegas on Wednesday when state and federal agents conducted a search of Sunrise Medical Center, Nevada's biggest hospital. Agents from the state's Medicaid fraud division and the FBI conducted a search of the Columbia-owned hospital in connection with a criminal investigation of the facility, Nevada Atty. Gen. Frankie Sue Del Poppa confirmed.

For all the partisan acrimony and special-interest Angst over the GOP's Medicare reform plans, even the most far-reaching proposal--set for House passage today--would only postpone a financial crisis likely to make the current stakes seem like child's play.

At least 90% of large U.S. hospitals with more than 300 beds operate at or over capacity for treating patients and sometimes have to divert ambulances to other hospitals, a survey reported Monday. The finding suggests that many emergency rooms are unable to handle even the day-to-day stresses, let alone any big emergencies, experts say.

Apria Healthcare Group Inc., under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Sacramento, said it is having trouble producing documents that justify its billing in federal health-care programs. In a report filed this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Costa Mesa home health-care giant said it discovered "errors" and "deficiencies" in supporting documents for billings to Medicare, Medicaid and other programs.

Cigna Corp., one of the nation's largest health maintenance organizations, said Friday it will abandon the Medicare market, forcing more than 100,000 seniors nationwide to find new health insurance. The move, effective Jan. 1, 2001, is expected to be followed by other managed care companies, which have been scaling back their Medicare participation since the federal government three years ago began reducing the amount of money it pays to take care of seniors.

Headline writers understandably reached for the jumbo-sized type last week when Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft warned that Al Qaeda might be planning an attack in the U.S. this year.

For-profit nursing homes and hospitals on average provide an inferior quality of care compared with their nonprofit peers, an extensive review of studies has found. Authors writing in the journal Health Affairs reported that a systematic analysis of 162 studies of nonprofit versus for-profit healthcare providers supports the concept that a facility's ownership status makes a difference in outcomes and in the cost of healthcare.

Overcrowding in Los Angeles County emergency rooms is forcing patients brought by ambulance to wait up to five hours in hospital hallways and lobbies, cared for by paramedics rather than doctors or nurses. Paramedics and ambulance workers with six months or less of formal training often are the only ones watching over patients who are seriously ill or even dying--a task many say is far beyond their ability.