In Case You Missed It — Healthcare Daily Digest for Wednesday, 16 January

The idea, it seems, was for Patxi’s Chicago Pizza, in San Francisco, to tack on a 4 percent surcharge to its bills, passing on the cost of healthcare to customers. (Starting in 2006, San Francisco required employers to provide health benefits to employees or make alternative payments to local goverment.) The employees needed healthcare. Patxi needed to provide it. However, Paxti didn’t necessarily need to pay for it itself.

Problem is, Paxti’s Chicago Pizza didn’t put that 4 percent surcharge into its employees’ health care coverage. It allegedly, according to KQED.com, just kept that money itself. Which it can’t do for a variety of reasons — the two main being: (1) It still wasn’t providing its employees with healthcare; and (2) if you tell your customers that, by paying 4 percent extra for eating your pizza, they’ll be covering employee healthcare, then you actually need to make sure that the 4 percent surcharge is going to employee healthcare.

Where things stand now is: Paxti agreed to a settlement with San Franciso rather than going to court — even though, as owner Bill Freeman says, “We likely would have won in court, but it wasn’t worth the expense.”

Weird — since Paxti has about $320,000 extra just lying around from that 4 percent surcharge.

Here are some other headlines, hand-picked for flavor and freshness:

• There’s a Reason Jeeves is a Butler, Not a Doctor: “About 35% of U.S. adults have gone online in the past year to diagnose their own or another person’s medical condition,” so opens a piece on InformationWeek.com titled Internet Has Yet To Replace Family Doctors.

• Turns Out, Maybe Everyone DOES Want to Hear About Your Rash!: Though I don’t know if a first-person account from someone about how service-y first-person healthcare stories can be is an unbiased way to get this information. But let me tell you about this cough I had once…

• A Match Made in Teamwork Heaven: “Arlington-based Texas Health Resources has teamed with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas for what the organizations are calling the area’s largest accountable care organization and one of the largest in the country.”