Grady Health System realized it couldn’t count on Medicaid expansion anytime soon, so it went looking for a different path. Expansion, already implemented in a number of other states, would have extended coverage to hundreds of thousands of low-income Georgians – turning them into paying patients. By doing that, it would have helped Atlanta’s Grady…
A health care company CEO says he was “speechless and stunned” when the feds asked Georgia to return more than $100 million in payments made to his firm’s nursing homes. Ronnie Rollins, CEO of Macon-based Community Health Services of Georgia, said in an interview Monday that company nursing homes had received the extra Medicaid funding…
Dr. Roslyn Banks-Jackson worries about what will happen to many women of Emanuel County when the local hospital shuts its labor and delivery unit. She’s the only ob/gyn currently practicing in the east-central Georgia county. And the practice, Emanuel OB/GYN Clinic, owned by the hospital, will soon be closing as well. Many of her low-income…
A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling about teeth-whitening services may have long-term implications for health care professionals and their practices across the country. The dispute involves the right of dental hygienists to perform such services in North Carolina. The Federal Trade Commission brought a major anti-competition case on the matter. The high court did not settle the case, but rejected…
Pa Saw Paw and Eh Kaw Htoo arrived in the United States seven years ago, bringing with them two children. They’re originally from the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, also known as Burma, but they lived in a refugee camp in neighboring Thailand for 20 years. Their ethnic group, a Christian minority known as the…
The suburban versus rural health divide remains the key theme in the latest ranking of Georgia’s healthiest counties. Forsyth is ranked the healthiest county in 2015, just as it was in the previous two years. It was followed by Gwinnett, Fayette, Cobb and Oconee. All are in the northern or north-central part of the state,…
Every Thursday morning, more than 100 bags of nutritious food are prepared at an old brick building in rural Oconee County. From there, volunteer drivers take the bags to schools in the county, where teachers and other school officials drop them into the backpacks of children (grades K-12) while the kids are out of the…
A special state panel created by Gov. Nathan Deal has proposed a pilot program that would use telemedicine and other techniques to bolster rural health care in Georgia. The Rural Hospital Stabilization Committee report, released Monday, supports a “hub and spoke’’ model to relieve the burden on rural hospital emergency rooms. It would use telemedicine-equipped…
The hospital partnership dance continues in Georgia. Given the pressures of the health care economy, nobody apparently wants to be a wallflower. Last week, St. Mary’s Health Care System in Athens said it is talking with financially ailing Ty Cobb Regional Medical Center about a possible acquisition of the Lavonia hospital. That announcement reverberated in…
This summer, the state’s main health agency will pick the winners of a multibillion-dollar annual contract to deliver health care to more than 1 million Georgians. The Department of Community Health also plans to choose a vendor this year to coordinate the care of Medicaid beneficiaries who are elderly or disabled. Clyde Reese, the commissioner…