Nurse Unions Move Forward With Merger Including Calif. Union / Settlement Gets Initial Approval in Case Over Payment Database

[CAL/AAEM News Service]

[cid:image001.gif at 01CA7C3B.01E574D0]
December 8, 2009
Nurse Unions Move Forward With Merger Including Calif. Union

The California Healthline<http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2009/12/8/nurse-unions-move-forward-with-merger-including-calif-union.aspx>

On Monday, the California Nurses Association and two other labor unions voted to merge to form the largest-ever labor organization of U.S. medical professionals, Reuters reports.
The new National Nurses United is composed of:
*            83,000 members of CNA from California and other states;
*            45,000 members of United American Nurses from mostly the Midwest; and
*            22,000 members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (Gaynor, Reuters, 12/7).
NNU will be led by three co-presidents drawn from each group, Modern Healthcare reports (Carlson, Modern Healthcare, 12/7). The unions will continue to operate separately but will be aligned under the larger organization (Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/8).
Objectives of the Merger
NNU officials said the union's priority will be to organize registered nurses who lack union representation.
The group is pushing for an end to mandatory overtime for nurses and other cost-cutting measures that have hurt patient care, union officials said (Reuters, 12/7). NNU also seeks to enact legislation modeled after California's nurse-to-patient ration law in other states (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/8).
The merger is expected to give nurses more power during collective bargaining negotiations and strengthen nurses' position in the health reform debate (Reuters, 12/7).
December  4, 2009
Settlement Gets Initial Approval in Case Over Payment Database

The California HealthCare Foundation<http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2009/12/4/settlement-gets-initial-approval-in-case-over-payment-database.aspx>

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lawrence McKenna granted preliminary approval for a settlement that would require UnitedHealth Group to pay $350 million to resolve allegations that the insurer's subsidiary Ingenix ran a flawed database that underpaid physicians for out-of-network care, Bloomberg reports.
The American Medical Association, the Missouri Medical Society and the New York State Medical Society brought the class-action lawsuit against the insurer in 2000. The suit is seeking damages for physicians who claimed they received insufficient reimbursements because of the Ingenix database.
McKenna is scheduled to hear arguments over a final approval for the settlement at a future court hearing.
Previous Settlement
In January 2009, UnitedHealth agreed to terminate its Ingenix database and pay $50 million to settle an investigation conducted by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (D).
Cuomo's investigation alleged that the insurers improperly manipulated data to reduce physician reimbursement rates (Glovin, Bloomberg, 12/4).
As part of the settlement, UnitedHealth agreed to help fund the creation of a new independent database designed to help insurers determine reimbursement rates for out-of-network care.
The not-for-profit organization FAIR Health will operate the database in collaboration with Syracuse University and other New York state universities (Masterson, HealthLeaders Media, 12/4).
Abid Mogannam &
Brian Potts MD, MBA
Managing Editors, CAL/AAEM News Service
University of California, Irvine
If you recently started to receive articles from the CAL/AAEM News Service, we have subscribed CAL/AAEM members and AAEM members living in California to our news service subscriber list. If you are not a member of the California Chapter of AAEM but are interested in joining, please go to our website http://www.calaaem.org and click the "Membership" section.

Contact us at: somcaaem at uci.edu<mailto:somcaaem at uci.edu>

For more articles, visit our archives<http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/calaaem/>.

To<mailto:somcaaem at uci.edu> unsubscribe<https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/calaaem> from this list, visit our mail server.

Copyright (C) 2008 The California Chapter of the American Academy of Emergency Physicians All rights reserved.

CAL/AAEM, a nonprofit professional organization for emergency physicians, operates the CAL/AAEM News Service solely as an educational resource for physicians. Dissemination of an article by CAL/AAEM News Service does not imply endorsement, agreement, or recommendation by CAL/AAEM News Service, CAL/AAEM, or AAEM.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/calaaem/attachments/20091213/97518b2c/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 27990 bytes
Desc: image001.gif
Url : http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/public/calaaem/attachments/20091213/97518b2c/attachment-0001.gif