LayoffBlog.com

The chief executive of Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, WA will be replaced as part of a major restructuring of executive ranks by the hospital’s owner. The changes come as the hospital deals with the effects of the recession and faces potential ramifications of changes to the nation’s health care system.

Source: TheOlympian

Fifty-one workers at Baystate Franklin Medical Center will lose their jobs in December as the hospital closes several behavioral health services in an attempt to cope with an operating loss which last year totaled $1.6 million.

Source: MassLive.com

Wednesday, healthcare centers operator Sun Healthcare Group, Inc. announced a reduction in its earnings forecast for fiscal 2009, to reflect changes in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. To mitigate the impact, the company said, it would reduce an unspecified number of jobs.

Source: RTTNews

Suffering from flat admissions growth, rising costs and growing numbers of uninsured and underinsured patients, Pocatello-based Portneuf Medical Center announced Sept. 9 it is cutting 40 full-time positions from its 1,279 employee work force.

Source: IdahoBusiness.net

MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island confirmed today that it plans to lay off 120 employees, citing the recession and its impact on hospital admissions.

Source: Chicago Tribune

Berkshire Medical Center and Berkshire Health Systems will announce another round of job cuts Tuesday. The reduction in staff will affect 65 full time employees, both union and non-union positions.

Source: News10

Kaiser Permanente on Tuesday disclosed plans to eliminate 1,200 jobs in Northern California (about 2 percent of its Northern California workforce), citing uncertainties over the economy, federal health care legislation and shrinking reimbursements for Medicare.

The jobs will be eliminated in the Bay Area, the Sacramento region, and the Central Valley area south to Fresno, Kaiser spokesman Jim Caroompas said.

Roughly one-third of the affected positions are temporary, on-call, or short-hour positions. All 1,200 of the positions are unionized.

Source: The Oakland Tribune

California: Mammoth Hospital officials have laid out the fact that 20 staff members will either leave voluntarily or face lay-off in July. Monday’s meeting also revealed that the hospital has lost as much as $3.3 million a year for “several years.”

Source: SierraWave

~News submitted by upthecreek

Okemos-based Delta Dental, for instance, has laid off 30 people and will lay off 30 more now that nearly 300,000 retirees from General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, their spouses and dependents no longer have company-provided dental coverage. The 60 lost jobs are 10 percent of Delta’s work force.

Source: CNBC, AP

~News submitted by upthecreek

A new federal subsidy designed to help laid-off workers pay for health insurance could be out of reach for thousands of jobless workers because they worked for a small company or their former employer has gone out of business.

If an employer terminates its group health plan, former employees are ineligible for COBRA, says Michael Langan, principal with Towers Perrin, a human resources consultant. That makes them ineligible for the subsidy, too, he says.

Source: USA Today

North Carolina’s unemployment rate reached 9.7 percent in January and it is likely to keep climbing for the rest of this year, which means the employer-subsidized health insurance coverage is going to be cut for tens of thousands of workers.

But thousands more who still work may lose their insurance anyway as small businesses have to choose between offering health care or laying off employees. Other workers may see deductibles rise so high they’ll only be able to use their insurance for catastrophic emergencies.

~News submitted by upthecreek

Source: CNBC

According to SFGate: “Kaiser Permanente is cutting 860 information technology jobs nationwide under a realignment that includes a $500 million deal giving IBM management duties at Kaiser’s medical records data centers.”

“The Oakland health maintenance organization, which has spent as much as $5 billion over the past five years building up its electronic records system, said Monday it has inked a seven-year deal with IBM to maximize the performance of its data processing units.”

“In a separate action, Kaiser is eliminating an additional 160 information technology jobs scattered across 30 locations as it pares back spending due to the impact of the economic downturn.”

“Of the 700 staffers affected by the IBM deal, 500 work at one of the California data centers, which are located in Pasadena, Corona, Napa, Walnut Creek and Irvine”

~News submitted by Jack R.

According to a report (PDF) by Families USA,

Nationally, to maintain single coverage, the average unemployed worker would need to spend 30 percent of his or her unemployment insurance (UI) check on COBRA premiums.

Maintaining family coverage under COBRA is an economic impossibility for most newly unemployed workers. Nationally, unemployed workers would need to spend nearly 84 percent of their UI income, on average, to pay for premiums for family coverage.

According to Bloomberg: “Cigna Corp. (NYSE:CI), the health insurer whose shares fell 69 percent last year because of investment losses, said it will cut about 1,100 jobs and take a fourth-quarter after-tax charge of $30 million to $40 million for 2008.”

According to NYTimes: “President-elect Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are considering major expansions of government-assisted health care insurance and unemployment compensation as they begin intensive work this week on a two-year economic recovery package.”

“Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra, and allow workers who lose jobs that did not come with insurance benefits to be eligible, for the first time, to apply for Medicaid coverage.”

“Obama advisers have said the package will carry a total cost of at least $775 billion.“