Regional Digest
July 12, 1999 2 minutes read
Regional Digest
• Florida law does not require criminal background checks of home health aides outside of the state boundaries. That is how John Karlavage found a loophole in the system. Karlavage was kicked out of the medical profession when he, a doctor, was found to have allowed a physician’s assistant to prescribe medicine, diagnose illnesses, and remove a cyst, then billed Medicaid as if he provided the services. He moved from Pennsylvania to Florida, where he got a job as a home health aide. Three months into the job, reported the St. Petersburg Times, he was accused of "making financial demands upon the trust officer" of a 95-year-old man in his care. The officer handled more than $500,000 worth of accounts. Karlavage also married the man’s daughter, who suffers from schizophrenia. A background check of Karlavage showed nothing criminal because it only covered the state of Florida.
• An occupational therapy assistant and her sister opened a used medical equipment store in Pueblo, CO, for people who need items that insurance won’t cover. Kathy Aleshire said that Adapt/Abilities is devoted to buying, selling, and trading equipment that disabled people need, reported the Pueblo Chieftain. "More and more insurance is not covering these things," she said, referring to shower chairs and commodes.
• At a subcommittee hearing in Wichita, KS, legislators talked about the effects of public financing on healthcare. At issue, reported the Kansas City Star, was the effects of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. The regional administrator for the Health Care Financing Administration in Kansas City said that the state had been getting too much federal funding for custodial care and other things that Medicare was never intended to pay. But opponents of the act saidz it is the elderly and poor who will suffer. Kansas hospitals will lose about $800 million in federal money in the first five years following the act’s passage, compared to hospitals nationwide that will lose $71 billion in payments. Hospitals are postponing capital purchases, reducing staffs, and cutting services to cope, reported the Star.
• Public health nurses and the Anne Arundel County Health Department in Maryland are squabbling over quotas the department wants to institute to measure the nurses’ job performance, reported the Baltimore Sun. The health department said the 11 nurses who administer the state’s Healthy Start home care program in Anne Arundel county should see at least 80 patients per month, a number most of the nurses already meet or exceed. But the five nurses who are state employees - the others are contract workers - argue that their average is not that high and that meeting quotas will force them to cut corners with their patients, who are pregnant mothers and newborns. If Anne Arundel is successful in forcing the quota, the rest of the state will follow.
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