Where there’s healthcare, politics never is far behind.
The two are set to be the focus of University of California, Irvine’s annual Health Care Forecast Conference.
The conference, the 15th in a series, runs Feb. 23 and 24 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering at UC Irvine. The Paul Merage School of Business and the College of Medicine put on the event.
Discussions are set to include Medicare reform, prescription drugs and an outlook on federal health legislation. Also on tap is an outlook for healthcare in California. Technology, changes in healthcare delivery and a strategic outlook on the healthcare market are slated.
Norman Ornstein, the political pundit, TV commentator and resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank, comes back for another stint as keynote speaker.
Other invited or confirmed guests include: Cindy Ehnes, director of the California Department of Managed Care; Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a think tank that includes Orange County among its review communities; Dr. David Brailer, the Department of Health and Human Services’ national coordinator for health information technology; and Sheryl Skolnick, a quotable managed care analyst who’s managing director of Fulcrum Global Partners LLC.
Financial sponsors include the California HealthCare Foundation, PacifiCare Health Systems Inc., a Cypress-based unit of UnitedHealth Group Inc., Toshiba America Medical Systems Inc. of Tustin; Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach and Beckman Coulter Inc. of Fullerton.
More UCI News
UCI appointed Peter Donovan, a developmental biologist known for pioneering research into the properties of stem cells, to its faculty.
Donovan, who comes to UCI from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, becomes the interim co-director of UCI’s Stem Cell Research Center, joining current interim co-director Hans Keirstead, an associate professor at the Reeve-Irvine Research Center.
Managed Care Market Narrows
Orange County has one less name among health maintenance organizations.
Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. said earlier this month that it is buying the health plan assets of Long Beach-based Universal Care Inc. for undisclosed terms.
The deal allows Health Net, which has more than 130,000 members in OC, to enroll an additional 20,000 Medi-Cal and Healthy Families beneficiaries locally. Health Net is going to add about 5,000 Medicare Advantage members and around 75,000 commercial members who have received coverage through Universal Care’s plans.
Universal, a smaller, family-owned and operated HMO, has had some financial problems and has drawn scrutiny from state regulators in recent years. It’s also faced much larger competitors, such as PacifiCare, which recently was acquired for $9 billion by Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealth.
Medicare Cuts Don’t Sway Docs
Payment cuts aren’t scaring off doctors from Medicare patients, a study from the Center for Studying Health System Change shows.
OC is one of 12 communities the center, a nonprofit funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, studies health trends in.
The center’s survey showed 73% of doctors said they accepted new Medicare patients in the 2004-2005 time frame, up from 71% in 2000-2001. Physicians’ willingness to accept Medicare patients remained high, in spite of a 5.4% payment cut in 2002 that hasn’t fully been offset by smaller increases in following years, the center said.
“While concerns about Medicare beneficiary access have focused on physician payment, policy-makers should recognize that Medicare fees are only one factor in physician decisions to accept new patients,in other words, Medicare fees don’t exist in a vacuum,” said Ginsburg, the center’s president, in a release.
Regulators OK Trimedyne Fiber
Trimedyne Inc., a medical device maker out of Irvine, said earlier this month the Food and Drug Administration cleared it to market VaporMAX, a fiber that is used with its holmium laser devices to treat several conditions.
Enlarged prostate glands are among the conditions that the device will be marketed for, Trimedyne said.
Enlarged prostate, also called benign prostate hyperplasia, affects more than 50% of men who are 55 or older. Trimedyne estimates some 200,000 procedures to treat the condition are done yearly in the U.S. Trimedyne said its new fiber qualifies for higher Medicare reimbursement.
Bits and Pieces:
Allergan Inc. of Irvine said that it expects the earliest that it will hear from the FDA on its Botox drug as a migraine headache treatment is in 2009. The drug maker said that it only had just agreed with the FDA on a third-phase clinical trial to look at the neurotoxin for treating migraines Ista Pharma-
ceuticals Inc. in Irvine updated its commercial and clinical progress last week at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Irvine-based Source Scientific Inc. said that it is going to make the Halo breast cancer-screening device for NeoMatrix Inc., also of Irvine. Source Scientific said it would begin to produce the Halo in the first quarter of this year and plans to add about eight jobs, bringing its total employment to around 60 Tustin-based Vestara said that Sunrise Medical Center in Las Vegas and Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., were selected as test sites for its EcoRex, a pharmaceutical waste management system. EcoRex is designed to keep drugs from entering ground water.
