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Universal Health Services, Inc., UHS of Delaware, Inc.(together, UHS), and Turning Point Care Center, LLC (Turning Point), a UHS facility located in Moultrie, Georgia, have agreed to pay a combined total of $122 million to resolve alleged violations of the False Claims Act for billing for medically unnecessary inpatient behavioral health services, failing to provide adequate and appropriate services, and paying illegal inducements to federal healthcare beneficiaries, the Department of Justice announced today.  UHS owns and provides management and administrative services to nearly 200 acute care inpatient psychiatric hospitals and residential psychiatric and behavioral treatment facilities nationwide.  UHS is...

CRUZ HITS TRUMP ON HEALTH CARE - AND HE'S KIND OF RIGHT - Locked in a close battle in Iowa, Ted Cruz is turning to health care in an attempt to separate himself from rival Donald Trump. A brutal ad airing in Iowa links "HillaryCare" and "ObamaCare" with "TrumpCare" - and uses Trump's own words against him. "Everybody's got to be covered, this is an un-Republican thing for me to say," the ad quotes Trump saying on 60 Minutes last fall. "[And] the government's gonna pay for it." Cruz pushed this message further on several Sunday shows. "A vote for...

The Ontario government has filed a defence against a claim made by a Hamilton woman who's at the centre of the U.S. debate over health care. Shona Holmes is featured in a TV campaign in which she claims she had to mortgage her home and travel to a U.S. clinic for brain surgery in 2005, due to a six-month wait for care in Canada. The ad, which began airing about two weeks ago in all 50 states, warns Americans to reject Canadian-style health care because it failed her. In the ad, Ms. Holmes states that if she relied on her...

TOKYO: Johns Hopkins Hospital, taking advantage of Japan's dissatisfaction with public health care, has launched a clinic in Tokyo that will charge as much as ¥2 million, or $17,000, for a three-day medical checkup. The Tokyo Midtown Medical Center, which opened March 30 in the city's tallest office tower, is a venture involving the Baltimore-based Hopkins along with Mitsui Fudosan and Resorttrust. The clinic is the latest of seven overseas projects since 2006 for Hopkins, which has topped U.S. News & World Report's ranking of American hospitals the past 16 years. Medical care for an aging population is absorbing more...

Eye specialist Sarah Anderson works at York Hospital. Her father Ian has been refused Sutent, a new cancer drug, which could provide the only real chance of prolonging his life. Sarah, 40, lives in York with husband, Bill, a computer programmer and their twins, Douglas and Ryan, five. As an ophthalmologist, I have spent my working life in the NHS. And for all its perceived failings, I have been proud of its fundamental role in our society - to provide equality of care for all. Of course, I've heard the term postcode lottery but as a doctor I've only ever...

Need radiation? Wait no longer than 8 weeks By SHAWN BERRY berry.shawn@dailygleaner.com Published Saturday March 31st, 2007 Appeared on page A1/A2 New Brunswick has signed a $21.3-million deal with Ottawa to guarantee wait times within eight weeks for cancer patients who need radiation therapy. Dr. Eshwar Kumar, co-CEO of the New Brunswick Cancer Network, said the investment will help recruit specialists to New Brunswick. He said state-of-the-art equipment being bought under the deal will be based in Saint John and Moncton. But that will benefit the entire province, he said, and bolster River Valley Health's efforts to recruit a second...

ER waits turn into three days Article Tools Print By SHAWN BERRY berry.shawn@dailygleaner.com Published Thursday January 25th, 2007 Appeared on page A1 Some patients are spending up to three days in the emergency room as the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital deals with a bed shortage. All 303 beds at the hospital are occupied and there were 17 patients in the ER on Wednesday night, said Geri Geldart, chief nursing officer. "All throughout the month of January ... we had as many as 10 or 15 patients waiting for one, two and sometimes three days in the emergency department," she...

Questionable City Spending San Francisco has a $5 Billon budget! That is $6,500 for every Man, Woman, and Child that lives in the City, and if you’re not paying your share in taxes then someone else is. This is a bigger budget than 20 states in the USA. Oklahoma has a $5 Billon budget and they have 5 million people to help pay for it, which works out to about $1,000 per person, which is the average across the Country to support a state government. San Francisco is just a city. During a 40 hour work week, the City would...

BANGOR — A dozen Canadians traveled by bus from Saint John, New Brunswick, on Monday to obtain access to health care they say they could not get or would have to wait for under their country's single-payer system. The three-hour trip to Bangor mirrored a strategy used by elderly Mainers who have taken long bus rides to Canada to buy low-priced prescription drugs. Organizers of Monday's trip say health care rationing, price controls, waiting lists and limitations on availability of drugs have forced some vulnerable patients to seek care in the United States. The trip was organized by Treatment Access...