Healthcare

Jeff Singer, the longtime president and chief executive officer of Health Care for the Homeless, announced his retirement Thursday, and the organization said it was immediately launching a search committee to identify a successor. Singer's 40-year career advocating for homeless people and families included 13 years at the helm of Health Care for the Homeless, which he joined in 1987. During his tenure, the group tripled the size of a Baltimore-based clinic and state headquarters and launched new dental and pediatric programs, and he oversaw a budget that quadrupled from $3.2 million in 1998 to $13.5 million this year.

A surgeon enters the operating room, offers his hands to a nurse and watches as she helps him into his rubber gloves with a snap. He glances at the patient on the table. A cloth covers the man's torso but for one area. Three trocars - tubes into which the doctor will slide high-tech cables - protrude from the abdomen. The procedure is nothing new for Dr. Adrian Park, a surgeon at Anne Arundel Medical Center who has fixed thousands of abdominal walls, watching his handiwork on a video screen as he replaces herniated tissue with state-of-the-art mesh.

A former U.S. Public Health Service official and an alleged labor racketeer have been convicted of conspiracy and bribery charges tied to an insurance kickback scheme involving Woodlawn-based United Healthcare Inc.The trial jury deliberated 14 hours over four days in U.S. District Court in Baltimore before it convicted John B. LaFrance, 48, alias Jim Lofton, of Haddonfield, N.J., the former public health service official, and Angelo T. Commito, 44, of...

Bob Duggan frequently refers to "our national disease-care system" when he talks about his new book, employing a term he has used across his 40-plus years as a healing-arts clinician and educator. As co-founder and former president of Tai Sophia Institute, a North Laurel graduate school of complementary medicine, wellness-based education and research, he believes that labeling our current system "health care" is a gigantic misnomer — and a point of national disgrace. In "Breaking the Iron Triangle: Reducing Health-Care Costs in Corporate America," Duggan offers a vision of a sustainable, wellness-based future in which corporations and entrepreneurs are able to slash rising health-care costs by investing in programs that focus on wellness instead of disease.

BLUE BELL, Pa. -- For months, Americans nervously watched Washington try to overhaul the nation's health care system. They should have been looking to Blue Bell instead.This southeast Pennsylvania town is the home of U.S. Healthcare, a leader in a revolution that is shattering the traditional relationship between doctor and patient.If you don't belong to U.S. Healthcare or another health maintenance organization, odds are that you will someday. Already, more than 45 million Americans, including 1.4 million Marylanders, get their health care through HMOs.

What does U.S. Healthcare know that's worth $8.9 billion?Aetna Casualty and Life Co., the 143-year-old insurance giant, announced last week that it was spending that much to acquire the aggressive health maintenance organization -- helping position Aetna to navigate a rapidly-changing health market."

Aetna Life & Casualty Co. announced yesterday that it would buy U.S. Healthcare in an $8.9 billion deal that would forge the largest managed-care company in the United States, reaching one in 12 Americans.The purchase demonstrates how managed care is overtaking traditional health insurance. It also accelerates a trend toward consolidation and the blending of roles between traditional insurers, managed-care companies and providers.In becoming the largest, Aetna vaults over United HealthCare, which itself jumped into the No. 1 spot with a huge takeover -- the $1.6 billion purchase last June of MetraHealth, an insurer that represented the merged health businesses of Travelers Group Inc. and Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.Another example of the consolidation trend was provided last week, when Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain, bought most of the operating units of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Ohio for $300 million.

Anne Arundel County school officials will meet with representatives of three unions to discuss a contentious proposal to change the administrator of one of its health care plans. "We believe it's comparable, if not better," said P. Tyson Bennett, attorney for the school board, of the proposal to switch to Minnesota-based United Healthcare. "We want the unions to be comfortable with that, as well." The decision to discuss the issue within 30 days came after speakers from three unions told school board members at a meeting yesterday that changing from CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield without negotiations would violate their contracts.

United HealthCare of the Mid-Atlantic will move 336 headquarters jobs from Baltimore to Woodlawn, but keep another 130 jobs in the city, Leon Kaplan, chief executive of the regional health insurer, said yesterday.Kaplan said he had considered consolidating the headquarters at a single site, either downtown or in Woodlawn, before deciding to split the operation. He said the Woodlawn site was "economically right," but, "I'm not comfortable moving out of the city."He said he wanted to maintain a city presence because "it's important that employers be good corporate citizens, and part of being a good corporate citizen is to help the city as much as possible.

They're United now.Nearly a year ago, United HealthCare Corporation, one of the nation's largest health maintenance organization operators, bought HealthWise of America.Nashville, Tenn.-based HealthWise owned Chesapeake Health Plan, a 20-year-old, 80,000-member Baltimore HMO.At first, there was little sign of the change in ownership. But after "transitional" advertising in November and December linking Chesapeake with Minneapolis-based United, Chesapeake officially became United HealthCare of the Mid-Atlantic on Jan. 1.The change will mean a lot more than new membership cards for Chesapeake subscribers.

Meagan Shipley, a nurse in the Baltimore City Health Department, works at a family planning clinic during the day and helps provide health care to workers on The Block in the evenings. When she was contacted by photographer Carolyn Jones to be part of a new coffee-table book, "The American Nurse," she agreed, hoping to publicize the work the city is doing to help workers in Baltimore's strip-club hub "A lot of people want to write off [Block workers]," she says. "I hate this attitude.

Omega Healthcare Investors Inc., the real estate investment trust based in Hunt Valley that invests in long-term health care facilities, earned $30.1 million during the third quarter of the year, the firm said in a statement Friday. Omega's third quarter 2012 earnings were 40.5 percent higher than earnings in same period last year, the company said. The firm's funds from operations, a figure often used to determine a real estate investment trust's health, increased 27.5 percent over the July through September period last year, the statement said.

The poverty rate in Baltimore held steady last year with about 1 in 4 counted as impoverished by the U.S. Census Bureau - a situation that economists say reflects the fits and starts of the nation's economic recovery. After a jump of more than 4 percent in the city's poverty rate between 2009 and 2010, the rate held steady in 2011, according to data released Thursday. That stagnation reflects the national trend. In the past two years, 15 percent of the U.S. population was living in poverty, up from 12.5 percent in 2007, the year the Great Recession began, according to census estimates.

UnitedHealthcare will announce Wednesday that it plans to hire 335 people in the Baltimore area as it enhances services to Medicare beneficiaries. The jobs will support the insurers' recently acquired XLHealth division, which provides Medicare health plans to underserved and chronically ill patients. The insurer, which employs about 2,700 at UnitedHealthcare and 556 at XLHealth, will increase its Maryland workforce by about 10 percent. UnitedHealthcare, the second largest insurer in Maryland, closed on an acquisition of Baltimore-based XLHealth in an all-cash deal in February.

I don't want to pay for other people's contraceptives, abortifacients and abortions. Further, I don't want to be forced to participate in insurance plans which mandate the provision of abortions and other services to which I am morally opposed. We should have the liberty to abstain from such programs and choose other plans from a competitive insurance marketplace. The federal government is limited to enumerated powers by the Constitution, which means the states are free to establish their own insurance laws and regulations.

As we enter the fourth year of an economic collapse and witness the remarkable emergence of "people power" across the country and around the world, the current crisis can be seen as an opportunity. Rather than rebuild the old status quo we should build smart, since all our societal problems are interrelated. Building smart means restructuring the health care system to serve the needs of people and their communities rather than to serve corporate profits. Because so many Americans' health care is tied to their jobs, when they lose those jobs their families' health care goes with them.

Aetna Inc.'s purchase of New York Life's health plans, announced yesterday, will strengthen Aetna in the Baltimore-Washington region, where it will be the third largest health insurer with more than 1 million subscribers.But customers will see no immediate difference. Aetna plans to take its time merging its networks and products with New York Life's health plans, which are called NYLCare."The integration will be on a market-by-market basis over a two to two-and-a-half-year period, with the smaller markets assimilated earlier," said Molly Knorr, general manager for the Baltimore market for Aetna U.S. Healthcare, Aetna's health unit.

United HealthCare officials are disappointed by an Arundel Circuit Court judge's refusal to block the school system from awarding a rival company the contract to administer the system's health care plan. "In the future, we hope to provide access to health care services for the employees of the Anne Arundel County Public School System and save the schools and taxpayers money," United HealthCare spokeswoman Beth Sammis stated. In September, after protest by four unions that represent school employees, school board members rejected United HealthCare's bid of a five-year, $15 million contract to administer its "preferred-provider" plan.

The health insurance giant UnitedHealthcare plans to acquire Baltimore-based XLHealth Corp., bolstering the company's portfolio of Medicare Advantage plans. The plans focus on Medicare recipients with chronic illnesses or other special needs. XLHealth's Care Improvement Plus plan focuses on the underserved. XLHealth, currently owned by management and affiliates of MatlinPatterson Global Opportunities Partners III LP, now serves about 113,000 Medicare Advantage members in Maryland and five other states and plans to expand to six more states next year.

St. Joseph Medical Center is looking to partner with other hospitals as it continues to lose patients and revenue in the wake of problems with its lead cardiologist - a move that experts say might even lead to a merger. The Towson hospital has asked area hospitals to present options for forming a "strategic partnership" that its executives hope would improve the quality of care and services to patients. St. Joseph executives, who insist the hospital is not for sale, said they were prompted to enter talks with other hospitals by changes in the health care industry.