The average monthly premium for Medicare's prescription drug plan will increase to an estimated $28 in 2009, an increase of three dollars when compared to this year's monthly premium, Medicare officials have announced. In a related development, Medicare officials also announced that 10 doctors-group practices participating in Medicare's Physician Group Practice Demonstration project showed improved quality of care for patients with congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease and diabetes. Due to the improvements, the groups involved in the project are being paid $16.7 million in incentives designed to reward healthcare providers for improving results and coordinating the healthcare needs of Medicare patients.
Insured children in the United States are much more likely than uninsured children to visit a doctor's office and to have a regular annual check-up, according to data released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The findings highlight the importance of government insurance programs such as Medicaid and SCHIP, according to the study's authors.
Floridians can now go online to find inspection reports and the results of complaint investigations involving most health facilities in the state. The data previously took a formal public-records request to obtain. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration began posting the reports online to give consumers another tool for assessing 32,000 hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, surgery centers, dialysis units, and other healthcare facilities. Consumers can look up official state reports written after annual inspections, investigations into complaints, safety inspections, and unannounced visits. Such reports include details of violations such as cleanliness, medical mistakes, and procedural errors.
Missouri Medicaid, now renamed MO HealthNet, is offering to provide as many as 210,000 Medicaid recipients with "medical homes," a clinic or doctor's office they can rely on for their basic care. The $33 million program is aimed at Medicaid recipients who are not already covered through a managed-care program. Those eligible include virtually all people with disabilities and elderly people with low incomes who are receiving Medicaid.
Even though more than half of all students attending U.S. medical schools are female, the neurosurgery field is having difficulty attracting and retaining women to the profession, according to a new report. The lack of women specialists in surgery of the brain and nervous system highlights a potential problem that could lead to a shortage of neurosurgeons as a whole given the increasing role of women in medicine, say the study's authors. Female board-certified neurosurgeons currently account for less than 6% of a neurosurgical work force that numbers more than 3,000.
Monroeville, PA-based medical supply company Intermedics-McCullough has filed suit against six medical device companies, alleging they made kickback payments to several Pittsburgh-area doctors to gain a competitive edge. In the suit, the owners of Intermedics-McCullough say the companies blocked them out of the market with inferior and more costly products by offering kickbacks "for the purpose of gaining exclusive access to the lucrative replacement hip, knee and joint industry and to the orthopedic industry in general." In addition to the six companies, more than two dozen physicians also are mentioned in the suit, with a listing of payments allegedly made to them by the defendants. The payments ranged from less than $100 to more than $8 million.