Tenet Tangles With California Blue Cross

Tenet (THC Quote) continues to make others heartsick.

The giant hospital operator -- once a self-proclaimed leader in the area of cardiac care -- has now left its biggest home-state health insurance company feeling rather ill. Blue Cross of California told TheStreet.com on Monday that it was "shocked" to discover an extraordinary rate of unnecessary heart procedures at the only two Tenet facilities it has scrutinized so far -- a finding that provoked it to withdraw coverage of certain operations at one of those hospitals.

"Three independent, blinded experts who did not know what they were looking at uniformly agreed that the surgical procedures were not indicated," said Jeff Kamil, a physician at the big insurance company. "The overall results said that 73% of the patients evaluated did not need surgery." ...