Healthcare Roundup: Mass Blues Cut Admin Costs, Hawaii Drops Child Healthcare, and More

Massachusetts Blues focus on internal cost-cutting -- In a departure for the managed-healthcare field, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts aims to rein in its own administrative costs as a way of coping with the erosion of employer-based health insurance and competition. The move strikes a sharp contrast with that of most health-insurance organizations, which typically deal with economic travails by raising premiums and attempting to bargain greater discounts from doctors and hospitals. [Source: Boston Globe via FierceHealthcare]

For health nerds only: Top coding hospitals identified! -- The consulting firm Ingenix has released its fifth annual report on the 200 hospitals who best comply with diagnosis and disease codes used to bill Medicare. [Source: Healthcare Finance News]

Hawaii drops universal healthcare for children -- Just seven months after it launched, Hawaii's universal child healthcare program is slated for death. The Keiki Care program -- "keiki" is Hawaiian for "child" -- aimed to cover every child 18 and younger who didn't already have healthcare, but foundered due to budget pressures and, reportedly, a shifting effect caused when people who could afford insurance for their kids began dropping it to get covered for free. All of which goes to show that state universal-healthcare program rarely survive economic downturns. [Source: AP]

Seniors stop taking drugs when they hit the Medicare "doughnut hole" -- Participants in the Medicare prescription-drug program face a tough choice when they exceed $2,510 in annual expenses, because the program stops paying until their drug costs qualify them for catastrophic coverage. Result: Many stop taking their drugs when they hit that doughnut hole, which politicians have vowed to fix. [Source: BusinessWeek]

Premier CEO to retire next June --Richard Norling, who shepherded the nonprofit-hospital alliance Premier for more than a decade following its 1996 inception, will retire next June. The alliance acts as a large purchasing organization that achieves the best medical-supply discounts possible for more than 2,000 hospitals. [Source: Modern Healthcare]

Health Wonk Review is up at Managed Care Matters -- For a biweekly helping of healthcare discussion and analysis, check out Health Wonk Review, hosted this week by the able (and often cited here) Joe Paduda. [Source: Managed Care Matters]