This article from the Washington Post examines the problem of legal and undocumented immigrants showing up in emergency rooms, where hospitals are required by federal law to treat and stabilize them. While the federal government helps subsidize uncompensated care by providing $11 billion through a Medicaid program that assists hospitals with a disproportionate number of low-income patients, it doesn't cover the entire need, the article states. Hospitals often turn to charities for help or pass the cost of uncompensated care along in higher prices to patients who do have insurance, reports the Post.
A small contingent of legal scholars and many Republican lawmakers argue that the health reform measures passed by both chambers are unconstitutional and will be ruled so by the Supreme Court. Their primary target is the the individual mandate, which requires people to get health insurance or pay a financial penalty of at least 2% of their income to the government. The mandate is a central component of Democrats' reform plans, which operate under the assumption that bringing everyone into the national insurance pool will reduce premiums across the board, the Washington Post reports.
Even as Democrats seek the biggest expansion of health coverage in decades, as many as 23 million people could still be without insurance by 2018, the Washington Post reports. The legislation that the Senate passed Christmas Eve would leave about 8% of the population under age 65 without health insurance, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It would extend insurance to 31 million of an estimated 54 million who would have no coverage without the legislation, reports the Post.
Both the House and Senate versions of the healthcare reform bills contain a mandate that everyone have insurance, be it through a job, the government, or the private market. But the mandate for near-universal coverage is generating opposition not just from libertarians but from some liberals and even from some members of the insurance industry, which stands to gain millions of new customers. Critics talk of legal challenges and complain that Americans will be locked into buying a product that threatens to become ever more expensive, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The Mayo Clinic stopped accepting Medicare patients on Jan 1 at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little. More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, AZ. The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, a Mayo spokesman said.
Several patients at Wisconsin-based Aurora Health Care, Inc. have filed class-action lawsuits over the way Aurora submits claims in bankruptcy. The suits, in federal and state court, claim Aurora violated Wisconsin's privacy law when it routinely filed proofs of claim against debtors that include patients' specific medical information as part of the billing records. The suits seek $25,000 in exemplary damages for each person whose private medical information was revealed. The suits also seek to have such information taken out of thousands of other debtors' existing files, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.