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If you want a glimpse of how single-payer health care would work, look at what’s happening to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center...As the Review-Journal’s Jessie Bekker reported Wednesday, 70 percent of the families who use Sunrise’s neonatal intensive care unit are on Medicaid. Sunrise CEO Todd Sklamberg says that Medicaid pays the hospital a flat daily rate of $1,487 per baby. That’s around one-tenth of Sunrise’s average daily charge of $14,815...Mr. Sklamberg said the hospital’s deficit for uncompensated infant care was $77 million last year. If the Legislature doesn’t increase Medicaid reimbursement rates this session, he said, Sunrise will consider reducing NICU services for all patients. The hospital, he said, is on an “unsustainable trajectory.”...This is the aspect of single-payer health care that Bernie Sanders doesn’t talk about...

Nevada’s public hospital in Las Vegas has been ordered to pay nearly $820,000 in sanctions and attorney fees for failing to produce required emails, text messages and computer records in an ongoing federal employee wages lawsuit...University Medical Center has until Dec. 5 to pay the penalty in the civil case alleging that thousands of nurses and other employees routinely worked through 30-minute meal periods for no pay...The court found that UMC had repeatedly violated its discovery obligations and its duty to preserve...noting that some electronically stored information that was turned over included “indecipherable codes complete with Japanese and Korean characters.”

Nevada's prisons pharmacy chief says she ordered and obtained lethal injection drugs this year despite knowing drug manufacturers didn't want their products used for executions...Linda Fox's drug purchases allowed Nevada to plan its first execution since 2006 using a never-before-tried three-drug combination...She testified...that she didn't specify the end use when she obtained medications from a third-party supplier, not the drug makers...Fox was pressed by lawyers representing drug companies a day after the state's prisons chief provided sworn testimony about having trouble obtaining drugs for executions...

Nevada officials have filed an emergency request with the state Supreme Court seeking to block a lower court’s decision to release the identity of the attending physician scheduled to oversee the delayed execution of Scott Raymond Dozier...In an emergency motion...the attorney general’s office, representing the Nevada Department of Corrections, is seeking to block a...decision by District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez. The judge said the state must reveal the name of the physician set to oversee Dozier’s execution to attorneys representing one of the drug manufacturers whose product will be used in the execution...Although Gonzalez’s order would limit disclosure of the physician’s identity to the attorneys for drug manufacturer Alvogen, the state wrote in its emergency request that the attending physician would only oversee the execution “to the extent their anonymity is protected from disclosure” and that even a limited disclosure of individuals involved in the execution wasn’t relevant and would limit the state’s ability to carry out the execution...“The drug manufacturers should not be permitted to go on a fishing expedition for information that can be used to harass individuals who assist the State in carrying out lawful executions,” attorneys with the state wrote in the filing. “The intended effect is to scare people away from assisting the State. This tactic is well-documented and, unfortunately, has been effective in stopping executions.”

Babies requiring care in the neonatal intensive care unit...can cost the hospital thousands of dollars daily, depending on the equipment or medication required to keep them stable, said Sunrise CEO Todd Sklamberg...But Medicaid, the insurer for about 70 percent of the hospital’s NICU patients, only pays up to $1,487 daily per baby...The discrepancy left Sunrise Hospital with $77 million in uncompensated costs for intensive infant care last year...Without a bump in payments for the hospital with the most pediatric acute care beds in the state and the only dedicated pediatric cardiology unit in Nevada, Sklamberg said he worries some of the hospital’s highest cost services...will disappear...Nevada’s Medicaid program is one of just a few nationwide to pay on a per diem rate...Most states reimburse hospitals based on what’s called a diagnosis-related group — a code that ties a reimbursement rate to the level and type of services provided by the hospital. But Nevada uses a flat dollar amount of $1,487 to pay back high-level NICUs, no matter the level of care provided...

The number of Nevada hospitals adhering to best practices on patient safety jumped in a new report…The state’s overall ranking rose to 16th, up from 40th in the spring...The rankings are based on the percentage of hospitals in the state earning A grades...which more than doubled in Nevada from just under 17 percent to 35 percent...Seven Nevada hospitals received top marks, including four in Southern Nevada: Henderson Hospital, Mountain View Hospital, North Vista Hospital and St. Rose Dominican Hospital, Rose de Lima campus. Northern Nevada Medical Center, Renown South Meadows Medical Center and St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Reno also received As.

Nevada Medicaid will reverse its decision to require prior authorization for mental health services after providers and patients raised concerns that the policy change could delay treatment...The Division of Health Care Financing and Policy will hold a public hearing in October to rescind prior authorization requirements for psychotherapy and neurotherapy services, including “talk therapy” and biofeedback. Medicaid behavioral health supervisor Alexis Tucey announced the change Tuesday at a public workshop in Las Vegas...The policy approved in August will still take effect Oct. 1, giving providers five sessions with a patient before they are required to submit additional documentation to the state Medicaid office...The change came as a relief to providers who were worried they would have to stop seeing patients while waiting for approval of additional sessions or risk denial of payment by continuing to see clients to avoid disruption in care...

In a city where quality customer service and visitor experience run the economy, professionals at UNLV’s medical school said embracing the same principles for sick patients will determine which future physicians rise above the pack...The level of service you have to provide has to mimic level of service that hotels provide to their guests…in Las Vegas, medical care providers must also go the extra mile to meet the standards of other industries’ high bar for customer service...that means offering tourists a courier service to deliver prescriptions to hotel rooms and daily phone calls checking in on the patient until the end of the patient’s Las Vegas vacation...

The Nevada Supreme Court is considering whether to put the brakes on oral arguments slated later this week on a bid by the state to resume planning the twice-postponed lethal injection of an inmate who says he wants to die...The high court called for a written response by Tuesday from state attorneys after pharmaceutical firms said there's no need to rush...The state attorney general's office has argued that unless the Supreme Court rules by mid-October whether the execution can proceed, some drugs will expire.

The Latest on a court hearings on a pharmaceutical companies lawsuit to stop Nevada from using their drugs for a lethal injection...Nevada's top doctor isn't licensed to practice medicine in the United States...Ihsan Azzam testified in Las Vegas...that he has a master's degree and worked for several years in environmental public health and epidemiology before being named chief state medical officer last May...Azzam says he practiced for several years as an obstetrics and gynecology physician in Africa before moving to the United States in the 1990s...That qualifies Azzam for the job under Nevada state law...Azzam testified that while he has no background in anesthesia or pain management, he says the doses of three drugs proposed for an inmate's lethal injection would be enough to kill a mammoth.