Cypress-based PacifiCare Health Systems Inc. still hadn’t settled on a lease for a Medicare-related drug distribution center in Kansas as of last week.
Costa Mesa-based Prescription Solutions, which handles prescriptions for PacifiCare members, has tax breaks in place for the planned center in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City.
But Prescription Solutions still hasn’t reached a pact to lease space at the Overland Park International Trade Center, according to the Kansas City Star.
One of the center’s majority owners, Greg Walton, said in the article that Prescription Solutions set a deadline of last Friday for reaching a lease agreement.
Tyler Mason, a PacifiCare spokesman, didn’t confirm the deadline to the newspaper. But he did say the date was in line with goals to complete a deal expeditiously.
“We won’t spend a lot of time with folks on negotiating leases if they’re not going to keep up at the same pace,” Mason told the newspaper.
Officials with Overland Park in May approved property tax breaks worth about $3.2 million during 10 years.
Including a public financing package, bringing Prescription Solutions to Overland Park could cost the city around $10.6 million.
Prescription Solutions plans to build a mail-order distribution plant employing up to 850 people. The unit is looking to set up another drug distribution plant because of rising demand for prescriptions, as well as an expected spike in demand from the pending introduction of Medicare Plan D, a drug benefit, in 2006.
PacifiCare long has offered Medicare health plans through its Secure Horizons brand, and was among several managed care companies that lobbied Congress for more funding. The effort paid off in late 2003, when President Bush signed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act.
Prescription Solutions’ other facilities include a pair of mail-order drug distribution centers just across the Orange County line in Carlsbad. PacifiCare has said those plants won’t be affected by the expansion.
In other PacifiCare news, Chief Financial Officer Gregory Scott was featured in a CFO Magazine article examining Medicare Part D. The article noted that PacifiCare was spending some $50 million internally to prepare itself to develop and market products, establish lists of preferred drugs, enroll and educate beneficiaries and deal with “mountains of federal regulations.”
Scott told the magazine that PacifiCare was looking to make sure that it had the best bid possible to present the federal government to provide drug coverage to seniors.
The article noted that a 12-person PacifiCare team is working with a consultant to design a cost-effective benefit system for providing drug benefits in the 34 regions where the company applied to offer Medicare Part D services.
UCI Med Center Ground Breaking
UCI Medical Center in Orange plans to break ground on a $370 million hospital building at the end of the month.
The plan isn’t affected by the state Senate’s decision earlier this month to give California hospitals another 12 years to make their buildings safe from earthquakes, its chief executive says.
“That’s not going to impact us at all,” said Dr. Ralph Cygan. “Our seismic issues were the 2008 seismic issues as opposed to the 2030. Our project has been designed (so) that it’s going to meet both the 2008 and 2030 seismic standards, so what we’re doing now will put us in good shape long-term.”
California’s seismic law had its roots in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which caused some two dozen hospitals in the Los Angeles area to close or limit their services because of damage. The Legislature ordered the state’s acute-care hospitals to ensure by 2008 that their buildings wouldn’t collapse in case of a major quake, and to guarantee by 2030 that their buildings were strong enough to continue operating after a temblor.
The Senate passed a law supported by the California Hospital Association. Under the new standards, all hospitals except those in the most precarious positions would no longer have to meet the 2008 standards if they agreed to finish renovations by 2020,a decade ahead of schedule.
The California Nurses Association and the Service Employees International Union, both of which have running battles with the hospital industry over nurse staffing and working conditions issues, were opposed to the reprieve and argued that hospitals are exaggerating their financial concerns.
About 430 hospitals in California are required to meet the 2008 deadline, according to the association. UCI Medical Center was on that list, along with Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach.
As for UCI’s hospital, Cygan said earlier this month that there already was a “tremendous amount of activity” on the facility’s Orange campus prior to the actual groundbreaking. That activity includes working on a ramp to the emergency department, re-routing sewer lines and working on power lines.
“We’ve got little pockets of construction all over the place right now,” Cygan said.
Bits and Pieces:
Christobel Selecky, the Irvine-based executive chairman of LifeMasters Supported SelfCare Inc., is going to be a featured speaker at the Disease Management Colloquium next week at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia StrataCare Inc., Irvine, introduced Provider-Key, a program designed to assist employers that use multiple workers’ compensation provider networks.
