Paying for Health Care

Medical City is Dallas' Most Expensive Hospital

It's always been nearly impossible to compare prices between hospitals. For one, most people who find themselves in an emergency room don't have the leisure to shop around. Even if they do, where are they going to turn? Healthcare providers don't typically put their prices on billboards. The opacity ... More >>

Dallas Interfaith Group to State Lawmakers: Expand Medicaid Now

Dallas Area Interfaith held a news conference this morning at Temple Emanu-El, where more than a dozen faith leaders from the Dallas area gathered to support Medicaid expansion. Since Friday, 60 clergy members from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish congregations have signed a letter calling on state l ... More >>

How Medicare Became a Thieves' Bazaar

In Dallas and across the country, hospitals, doctors and dealers have made Medicare the nation’s sweetest crime. The feds are now trying to shutter the door.

Texas is Last in High School Graduation, First in Hazardous Waste, and Other Depressing Tidbits from a New Legislative Report

The Texas Legislative Study Group is a caucus of around 50 Democratic representatives from the Texas House, and they're real buzzkills. The LSG keeps a full-time staff of policy analysts around, who almost every year since 2003 have released a report called "Texas on the Brink," detailing all the mo ... More >>

Pill-Pushing Founder of a South Dallas Clinic Pleaded Guilty to Health-care Fraud Yesterday

In 2003, Dr. Daniel Leong opened the South Dallas Community Medical Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a few blocks from Fair Park. It was something of a second chance for Leong, who pleaded guilty to mail fraud in 1989 after he was caught writing prescriptions to supply his wife with near ... More >>

New Report Details the Incredible Stupidity of Texas' Rejection of Medicaid Expansion

In July, Governor Rick Perry sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius explaining why the state of Texas would not be taking part in the federal government's plans to expand Medicaid. Such an expansion would "enlarge a broken system that is already financially unsustain ... More >>

The American Lung Association Gives Texas an 'F', Calls it the "Tobacco Industry's Playground"

Smoking rates in the U.S. are plummeting. According to the CDC, there were three million fewer smokers in 2010 than in 2005. The factors contributing to this decline are are fairly obvious: improved educational efforts; cessation programs; higher cigarette taxes; tighter state and local anti-smoking ... More >>

Business Lobbyists Offer Help with Fixing Deficit. Kiss Your Asses Goodbye, Old and Sick People

This country is being hoodooed by the oldest magic show trick in the book -- misdirection. The fictional crisis of entitlement spending is just a new version of the stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress, the latest cheap trick by the super-rich to turn our attention away from the truth. For a glimpse of ... More >>

Parkland's Future CEO Can't Heal Hospital Without Support Missing from Austin and D.C.

Warren Fagadau, a Dallas ophthalmologist who has been involved in health insurance reform efforts in Texas, has a piece on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News today about the qualities our public hospital in Dallas should look for in its ongoing search for a new chief executive officer. His vi ... More >>

Texas Leads the League in Bad Nursing Homes, Partly Because It Won't Regulate the Offenders

In March 2011, after federal inspectors visited Keeneland Nursing and Rehab, a Weathorford nursing home, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a report detailing a laundry list of concerns. The report concluded that staff were medicating patients unnecessarily so they'd be easier to d ... More >>

This Is What Texas Stands to Spend, and Gain, with Obamacare

Governor Rick Perry vows that the Medicaid expansion prescribed under Obamacare won't come to Texas, the state with the highest rate of uninsured in the country. He fears it would render Lone Star State health care a mere "appendage" of the federal government. The feds, of course, would pick up nea ... More >>

DART is Mulling Domestic Partner Benefits, Thanks to a Former Employee's Petition

This summer, Andrew Moss, a former DART police officer, launched a petition urging the transit agency to offer domestic partner benefits. Moss had worked for DART until health problems forced him to step down in 2008. Though his husband continued to work there as a police officer, their marriage is ... More >>

Day After Obama Talks Up Medicare Fraud Fight in Debate, Feds Say They've Taken Down $100 Million of Local Schemes

One of the things Obama took pains to highlight during last night's debate was just how aggressively his administration has gone after Medicare fraudsters. Remember Jacques Roy, the Rockwall physician accused of masterminding a scheme to bilk the government of $375 million? Probably not, since the d ... More >>

More Than 300,000 People in Dallas County Would Get Health Insurance Under Obamacare, But Not In Rick Perry's Texas

Some six million Texans are one health emergency away from financial ruin, and the state of affairs in Dallas County isn't any better. Nearly 30 percent of its residents are uninsured. That's 672,681 of our neighbors whom the health insurance markets have excluded, according to the latest U.S. Cen ... More >>

Dallas State Rep. Stefani Carter, Now a Romney Surrogate, on Why Romney Should Get the Black Vote

Seems like it was only a month-and-a-half ago that Stefani Carter, the Republican state rep from North Dallas, was just another face in that Mitt Romney campaign piece about how, despite having just been booed during his speech to the NAACP, black people love him. Now, she's a full-fledged surrogate ... More >>

Medicare Debate is the Real Death Squad Issue

Reading about the Medicare debate and listening to friends and neighbors talk about it, I always come to the same conclusion: Your opinions depend entirely on your personal experiences. A commenter here the other day said he thought most old people are "responsible" and have provided for their own ... More >>

Paul Ryan Pick Proves They Don't Make Rich People Like They Used To

What country is this? Have I been on some kind of horrendous toot, and did I sleep for a month, and did I wake up in the wrong country? All weekend long on my TV set I kept seeing Paul Ryan, the right-wing social Darwinist cheese-head, and they said he was a candidate for vice president of the Unite ... More >>

Texas Plans to Use Medicaid Expansion it Rejected to Pay For Women's Health Program

In early June, Governor Rick Perry was quick to announce that no state of his would be taking any of that tyrannical federal money to expand Medicaid coverage. Yet court documents filed by outgoing Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Suehs claim that the state's new, Planned Parenthood-free W ... More >>

Lawsuit Accuses Dallas Doctors of "Drive-By Billing" and Other Systemic Medicare Fraud

Two years ago, Cortez Mills was hired by Texas Vascular Associates, a network of nine physicians and a half dozen clinics in Dallas and suburbs, to work in their medical office, where she had the sisyphean task of trying to wrangle reimbursement from Medicare and insurance companies. It didn't take ... More >>

Now Texas Wants its Women's Health Program to Ban Doctors from Talking about Abortion

As Governor Rick Perry vows not to take any of that filthy federal money to expand Medicaid in Texas, state lawmakers may also have to find another $39 million next year to keep the Medicaid Women's Health Program alive. These days, the WHP has been going through some prolonged death throes. Texa ... More >>

Perry Says NO-bamacare for Texas

This morning, in a move about as surprising as the sun rising, Governor Rick Perry came out with guns blazing against the Affordable Health Care Act, recently approved (mostly) by the U.S. Supreme Court. The act's expanded Medicaid coverage for the poor will not be implemented in Perry's state, de ... More >>

Supreme Court Upholds Health Care Law

Update at 9:40 a.m.: Check out the full decision below. Original post: We were planning to try to localize the Supreme Court's decision this morning on the Affordable Care Act, do some sort of informed, level-headed analysis like the DMN's Michael Lindenberger prepared last night. But that would re ... More >>

Dallas Doctor Tops State in Taxpayer-Funded Weight-Loss Surgeries

Over the weekend, the Texas Tribune published one of those eye-opening, number-crunching reports the website has made its niche. This one is about weight-loss surgery, specifically weight-loss surgery that is paid for by taxpayers. This is a relatively new phenomenon, the Tribune notes. Medicare on ... More >>

Federally Mandated Improvements at Parkland Will Top $31 Mil

Parkland Memorial Hospital was almost shut down last year after federal inspectors threatened to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicare and Medicaid funding after finding "deficiencies that represent an immediate and serious threat to patient health and safety." Because of its size and ... More >>

Texas Has More Uninsured Veterans Than Any Other State. So That's Lovely.

The difficulties faced by military veterans returning home, from elevated divorce and suicide rates to a harsh job market, have been well documented. Turns out, many of them also don't have health coverage. According to a study released last week by the Urban Institute, 10 percent of veterans lac ... More >>

Federal Medicaid Agency Lays Out Just How The Women's Health Program Will End

What prompted Governor Rick Perry's frenzied bout of outraged tweeting about the Women's Health Program yesterday? As much as we'd like to speculate that it was a bad batch of PCP (and will continue to do so privately, purely for our own amusement, not because it's at all true), it was actually one ... More >>

Rick Perry Vows to Save the Medicaid Women's Health Program from the Evil Feds

Update, March 10: Federal Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced late Friday in Houston that federal funding to the WHP would be cut. She said the program will wind down over the next several months, and that the feds are considering funding Planned Parenthood directly. In r ... More >>

From Texas or Russia, Medicare Scamsters Are All the Same -- Greedy

Here we are, with the biggest Medicare fraud in history going -- so we are told -- and The New York Times devotes its front page today to a story about Medicare fraud carried out by organized Russian gangs in ... oh, guess where! ... New York City! What can we do down here in Dallas to get respect? ... More >>

Medicaid Women's Health Program Is One Step Closer To Death

The Medicaid Women's Health Program provides some 130,000 Texas women with vital medical care: family planning, birth control, cancer screenings and annual exams. And for that, of course, it must die. That, at least, has long been the case as far as Republican lawmakers are concerned. And after last ... More >>

A Successful Health Program May End Thanks to Texas's Quest to Kill Planned Parenthood

ViaYou, sir, must not be a Texas legislator.​It's been a good 14 minutes since the state twisted its rusty knife into the already-wounded gut of women's healthcare. But fear not: There's a huge, ugly storm brewing between the state and federal governments over the Medicaid Women's Health Progr ... More >>

As Parkland Hospital Selects Interim CEO, It Also Decides What to Do With Ron Anderson

​The man who see at right is Thomas C. Royer, M.D., who, for 12 years, was the man in charge of CHRISTUS Health, described on its website as "a Catholic health ministry." Not long ago he received the American Hospital Association's Distinguished Service Award, one among myriad high honors on a ré ... More >>

Old White People Who Think They Can Just Check Out Should Think Again

So what is all this anger among the old white people really all about? Why are old white people wearing odd costumes and hating the president all the time? We old white people all know exactly what it is. But nobody will say it out loud. It never comes out in the stories, even though it's right the ... More >>

Doc's Whistleblowing Results in Parkland, UT Southwestern Paying $1.4 Million to Feds

Gentilello in a 2005 UT Southwestern photo​Amidst all the other things going on with Parkland at the moment, there remains one other Very Big Thing you've probably forgotten all about: Dr. Larry Gentilello's allegations that trauma residents at the county hospital were treating patients and perfo ... More >>

It's Getting Expensive As City, Whistleblowing Auditor Wrangle Over Retaliation Claims

​Of the myriad lawsuits involving the city, Doug Moore v. City of Dallas et al is among the most expensive -- and getting a little more pricey all the time. This case, for those not keeping score at home, has already cost the city $2.5 million, paid to the state and the feds in June over allegatio ... More >>

State GOP Legislators' Revenge Won't Be on Democrats, But on the Old, Poor and Sick

​People all over America should watch the special session of the Texas Legislature, just now beginning, if they want to see what Republicans are really up to. Among other things, they're out to kill Medicare and Medicaid. The regular session was stymied at the last minute when Democratic sta ... More >>

Why Should You Pay for Park Cities Dowagers' Trinity Baubles?

​Check me on this. In an atmosphere of federal, state, county and city funding crises, where we may even see the defunding of federal health care reform, the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, an absolute decimation of support for public schools and impoverished children, drastic ... More >>

How Bad Will Things Have to Get Before We Make Them Better?

Does Texas Need a Debacle?

​Two experiences over the weekend have given me hope. One was watching a documentary on the catastrophic 1911 Triangle Waist Factory Fire in New York, and the other was a seminar I attended on the state budget crisis. Debacles can be good for us. The documentary made an argument that the sh ... More >>

Bridge Building

Golden Acres Heads to Federal Court to Take on Kathleen Sebelius and Medicare's "Hospice Cap"

Kathleen Sebelius​The National Alliance for Hospice Access lays out very clearly what the so-called "hospice cap" is, but long story short: In 1982, Congress enacted a law that allowed Medicare beneficiaries to choose hospice care over hospital care. There was one caveat: Congress put in place a c ... More >>

Whose Dole Is It, Anyway?

Outside a Quiet Two-Party Town Hall, Health Care Demonstrators Take To the Streets

Patrick MichelsDemonstrators on both sides of the debate shared space outside this morning's town hall meeting with Rep. Pete Sessions and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson.​Update: Check out our slide show for more photos from the meeting and the protest.Walking up to the health care reform protest outs ... More >>

Today In Music News: Obama Still Loves Jackson and Kanye Becomes A Director

Your daily dose of national music news for Monday, July 6, 2009... Americans can sleep easier tonight: President Obama still has Michael Jackson songs on his iPod. Now, how about that universal health care, sir? Kanye West now has something else he's the best in the world at: being a music video di ... More >>

Wheeler Dealers

Feds allege scam artists bilked Medicare for millions

Hoosegow HMO

A contained experiment in Medicaid

Slicing the pie

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison switches to the side of the angels in Texas' tobacco battle

Congressional hopeful Jerry Frankel has ideas, brains, and GUTS.

Dick Armey will eat his lunch.

A pox on 1995!

Next year will be better

Rich man's Robin Hood

GOP budget is greatest-ever transfer of wealth from the Have-Nots to the Haves

Couldn't Medicare less

Shady goings-on in the fight over health care