Regional Digest
Regional Digest
• Kapiolani Health (Honolulu, Hawaii), ending a two-year civil investigation by state and federal authorities, agreed last week to pay $3.4 million to settle charges that it overbilled Medicare and Medicaid for services provided by its now-defunct home care divisions. Under the settlement, the two-hospital system admitted no wrongdoing, reported Modern Healthcare. Hawaii’s deputy attorney general told Modern Healthcare that the state will continue a separate investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing in connection with the home care overbilling. Roger Drue, Kapiolani’s president/CEO, said in a written statement that two Kapiolani subsidiaries, Kapiolani Home Health Services and Kapiolani Extended Care, overbilled Medicare and Medicaid by more than $700,000 in the mid-1990s because of its failure to effectively oversee its activities. Of the settlement amount, $1.9 million will go to the federal government, $700,000 will go to the state, $630,000 will go to the whistleblower, and $180,000 will go to the whistleblower’s lawyer.
• California union officials from Los Angeles to Sacramento are pushing for pay raises for thousands of minimum-wage home care workers, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. Late last year, union officials won the right to represent about 3,800 in-home healthcare workers in Contra Costa County. And early this year, 74,000 home care workers in Los Angeles joined the union, representing the biggest labor organizing victory in California since the 1940s. But even though labor has pushed for changes since the late 1980s, the Chronicle reported, their progress has often been measured in wage increases of just a few cents per hour. And Contra Costa County passed its budget last month without increasing pay for newly unionized personal health assistants, reported the Chronicle. But union members want more.
• Sacramento County home care workers are closer to their goal of working under the protection of a nonprofit public authority, reported the Business Journal of Sacramento. Legislation signed by Gov. Gray Davis in July requires counties to establish an employer of record within three years for home care workers. Their paychecks are issued by the counties, but many home care workers are considered independent contractors, hired directly by clients. An ongoing movement is trying to establish a nonprofit, public authority in each county that would act as an employer for the state’s 200,000 home care workers, the Journal reported.
• Optimum Home Health Care, part of Frontier Group (Boston), closed its doors last week, leaving nearly 400 eastern Massachusetts patients without home care. An undisclosed number of employees were let go, reported the Boston Herald. Most of Optimum’s patients are being placed with other home care providers, the Herald reported.
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