Across the country, state officials are wading through the minutiae of the healthcare overhaul to understand just how their governments will be affected, the New York Times reports. But it is clear the law may be as much of a burden to some state budgets as it is a boon to uninsured consumers. States with the largest uninsured populations, like Texas and California, might be considered by its backers the biggest winners to emerge from the law, because so many additional residents will have access to health insurance. But because those states are being required to significantly expand their Medicaid programs, they are precisely the ones that will face the biggest financial strains, the Times reports.
President Obama will soon name Donald M. Berwick, MD, an iconoclastic scholar of health policy, to run Medicare and Medicaid, administration officials announced. Berwick, a pediatrician, is president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass. He has repeatedly challenged doctors and hospitals to provide better care at a lower cost. He says the government and insurers can increase the quality and efficiency of care by basing payments on the value of services, not the volume, the New York Times reports.
Donald Berwick, President Barack Obama's choice to lead the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, would face the major challenge of overseeing sweeping changes to both programs required under the recently enacted healthcare overhaul, if elected. According to two administration officials, Obama will nominate Berwick, a Harvard University professor and specialist in patient safety, to take over the top post at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Some advocates of a tort overhaul said the new healthcare bill signed by President Obama failed to address their chief concern: that outsize jury verdicts have driven up the cost of malpractice insurance. Such verdicts have also caused doctors to practice "defensive medicine" in which they order unnecessary and pricey tests or procedures, according to tort-overhaul advocates.
Central Maryland is in the midst of a healthcare building boom, with more than $2 billion worth of hospital expansion projects under construction or planned to begin this year in Baltimore and the surrounding counties. An additional $500 million worth of healthcare-related projects are in the works near Baltimore-area medical centers. While other development has slowed as a result of the recession, hospitals throughout the region are adding emergency rooms, operating suites, pediatric units, and other facilities. Additional life sciences buildings are also opening for researchers and lab technicians who want to be near hospitals or in one of Baltimore's two bioparks, the Baltimore Sun reports.
Physicians' reactions to President Obama's healthcare legislation are complicated and varied, and depend largely on the type of medicine they practice, the Washington Post reports. Primary-care physicians will "absolutely" benefit from the bill, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. She said she is particularly looking forward to a 10% Medicare bonus for primary-care physicians for the next five years. Some radiologists, however, are concerned about Medicare cuts to medical imaging.