As he took me through an interactive map on his computer screen, Oakland physician Nate Gross showed me what a neurosurgeon in my area might expect to make. Scrolling his cursor over the D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland, a number appeared: $580,000. I knew that, vaguely, but I did gasp. "But if you move down to South Carolina," Gross continued, scrolling south, "here, you're looking at $645,000." In an even more drastic example, the average anesthesiologist practicing in Massachusetts would increase her salary by 61 percent if she moved to Wisconsin.
The announcement by the Obama Administration that it will start tying most of its Medicare reimbursement to quality or value rather than volume has garnered a lot of positive responses -- but not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.
The anesthesiologist was getting nervous. Joan Rivers, the comic known for her sassy wit and raspy voice, had been complaining of more than the usual hoarseness. Now Ms. Rivers was on the operating table at an Upper East Side clinic and her private doctor, Gwen Korovin, wanted to send a small instrument into her windpipe to take a second look at her vocal cords, according to a malpractice lawsuit filed Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The anesthesiologist warned that the cords were extremely swollen, and that they could seize up and Ms. Rivers would not be able to breathe.
The total price tag for ObamaCare's insurance programs will be 20 percent less than expected, the government's budget office said Monday. The law's insurance provisions are now expected to cost $571 billion through 2019 — a drop of about $139 billion from the government's earliest estimates five years ago, according to new estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The drop in spending is largely due to the smaller-than-expected subsidies load because enrollment in health insurance through ObamaCare has been slower than expected. The CBO had initially expected 13 million people to sign up for health insurance through the exchanges by the end of this year, though it since revised that figure to 12 million.
President Barack Obama wants the U.S. to invest much more in fighting antibiotic-resistant germs to prevent re-emergence of diseases conquered long ago. The White House said Tuesday that Obama will ask Congress to nearly double its funding to fight antibiotic resistance to $1.2 billion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 23,000 Americans die every year from infections that can withstand some of the best antibiotics. The World Health Organization said last year that bacteria resistant to antibiotics have spread to every part of the world and might lead to a future where minor infections could kill.
Obamacare co-ops were supposed to be a new way to get insurance to people to help them maintain their health, but more than a year after they first began selling coverage plans, a number of those co-ops might be needing some financial medicine of their own. Before last Friday's failure of a Midwest-based co-op, a new analysis of the Obamacare co-ops detailed the losses that were booked by all but one of the two dozen nonprofit insurers through the third quarter of 2014. Aggregate underwriting losses at the co-ops hit nearly $244 million through Sept. 30, compared to just more than $72 million in the first quarter of 2014.