Read today’s Kaiser Health News
In other news:
Hospitals boost their profit expectations for 2025 as health insurers stumble: Two major investor-owned hospital chains upped their 2025 revenue and profit forecasts this week, in stark contrast to health insurers, who’ve been doing the opposite.
HCA Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare, for-profit chains that collectively own 240 hospitals, both said their revenue and profit came in stronger than expected in the second quarter, which ended June 30, prompting them to issue more optimistic financial forecasts for the year.
About Covid-19
Global Estimates of Lives and Life-Years Saved by COVID-19 Vaccination During 2020-2024: This comparative effectiveness study found that COVID-19 vaccinations averted 2.5 million deaths during 2020-2024 (sensitivity range estimates, 1.4-4.0 million) and saved 15 million life-years (sensitivity range estimates, 7-24 million life-years). The estimated benefits had a steep age gradient.
See, also: COVID-19 Vaccination Saved Lives and This Matters in 2025
About health insurance/insurers
Direct Primary Care Providers Get a Major Policy Win: Clinicians who provide “direct primary care” (DPC) and their patients are gaining a major windfall from the recently passed federal budget reconciliation legislation. Thanks to the “Big Beautiful Budget Bill,” patients will be able to dip into their health savings accounts (HSAs) to pay for DPC services, which are designed to offer relief from assembly-line medicine…
DPC is a healthcare delivery model that allows physicians to contract directly with patients or employers for a fixed monthly membership fee.
The DPC membership fees typically cover unlimited routine primary care services and lab work plus preventive care, basic procedures, and vaccinations — but not prescription drugs or specialty services. There are no copays…
Is DPC the Same as Concierge Care? The terms are often used interchangeably, said healthcare attorney Joanna Eimer of Glenview, Illinois, in an interview although she thinks of them as distinct. DPC is a kind of concierge care, she said, “but there are a lot of concierge services that have grown and become bigger, different kinds of models that include other services as well besides direct primary care.”
Centene posts $253M loss in Q2: Centene posted a $253 million loss in the second quarter as the company continues to face challenges across its ACA, Medicaid and Medicare Advantage businesses.
Medicaid Payment Policy and Colorectal Cancer Screening Rates: This statewide Medicaid initiative demonstrated that targeting financial incentives at managed care plans rather than individual physicians was associated with improvements in population-level CRC screening among underserved populations. The approach aligned incentives across multiple system levels, promoting operational changes that extended from plans to physicians to patients. [Emphasis added]
About hospitals and healthcare systems