Closer Look
After scooping up Geisinger, where's Kaiser Permanent going next?
Lisa Lake/Getty Images for Geisinger Health System
It wasn't so long ago that the Geisinger, the rural Pennsylvania hospital system and health insurer, was held up as a shining example of how high-quality health care could be provided at low cost, drawing praise from President Obama in 2009 as he campaigned for the health care model that took his name. But Geisinger's reputation was tarnished in later years by failed deals, management missteps, antitrust allegations, and local competition. In that context, its blockbuster deal with Kaiser Permanente last week makes more sense, STAT's Bob Herman explains.
What's next? "What you're seeing is the real changing nature of competition," Sachin Jain told Bob. Jain is the CEO of SCAN Group, a health insurer in California, Arizona, and Texas in the process of its own merger with an insurer in Oregon. "Competition in health care has been really regional. It's going to be increasingly national." Read more.
mental health
To identify children at risk, researchers find factors that could signal future self-harm
The strongest predictor of self-harm among children and adolescents is a previous attempt. A study out today in Pediatrics adds more detail to what else these young people might have in common, in hopes of flagging trouble before it happens. Looking at records of more than 1,000 children age 5 to 17 who'd been admitted to hospitals in Tennessee and Colorado for neuropsychiatric reasons, they found that more than a third had seriously harmed themselves. They framed other factors in these four profiles:
- Very high-risk: males age 10 to 13 with ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and other developmental disorders.
- High risk: females ages 14 to 17 with depression and anxiety along with substance- and trauma-related disorders. Personality and eating disorders were also significant.
- Moderate risk: No depressive disorders.
- Low risk: children age 5 to 9 with a non-mental health diagnosis and no mood, behavioral, psychotic, developmental, or trauma- or substance-related disorders.
health
Opinion: Poisoning schoolgirls is not the only health tragedy in Iran
Children, mostly girls, are being poisoned at their schools in Iran, sickened and some dying after exposure to a toxic gas. The chemical attacks began in November 2022, but the international community learned of them in February. Suspicions are high that the attacks are a government response to the protests led by women and girls decrying the arrest and later beating death of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini for allegedly not covering her hair properly.
"The poisoning of schoolgirls is not the first health care-related tragedy in Iran in recent months," Iranian American physician Arghavan Salles of Stanford writes in a STAT First Opinion. "The very act of practicing medicine in Iran is now hazardous." Doctors have been killed, ambulances co-opted by security forces, and medical care withheld from protesters. Salles urges medical workers here to take action. Read what Salles suggests people can do from a distance.
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