When the Supreme Court rules in King v. Burwell, the new Obamacare challenge, its judges won't be the first to grapple with whether the health law's subsidies on the federal marketplace are legal. Since early 2014, five separate courts have issued rulings on the issue in three separate health law challenges. Three courts have ruled in the Affordable Care Act's favor; two have ruled against the subsidies. Even for those following the case closely, it can be difficult to keep track of all those decisions.
Four popular national rating systems used by consumers to judge hospitals frequently come to very different conclusions about which hospitals are the best ? or worst ? potentially adding to the confusion over health care quality, rather than alleviating it, a new study shows. The analysis, published on Monday in the academic journal Health Affairs, looked at hospital ratings from two publications, U.S. News & World Report and Consumer Reports; Healthgrades, a Denver company; and the Leapfrog Group, an employer-financed nonprofit organization. No hospital was considered to be a high performer by all four, according to the study of the ratings from mid-2012 to mid-2013, and the vast majority of hospitals earned that distinction from only one of the four.
Nearly all pediatricians and family doctors have been asked at least once by parents if they could "space out" the vaccines their children get and most have agreed to do so at some point, a new study finds. The main reason given is that doctors are afraid of losing their patients - costing them business but also potentially leaving innocent children without good health care, according to the survey published in the journal Pediatrics. The study's especially timely as the nation debates whether parents have the right to leave their children less than fully vaccinated because of personal beliefs and worries.
Any hopes-- however remote-- of Congress passing a permanent repeal of Medicare's sustainable growth formula by March 31 were doused at the recent advocacy meeting of the American Medical Association. Rep. Tom Price, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, told AMA members that there's just not enough time to get a full repeal done before the deadline and the most likely scenario was a four-to-six-month patch. Instead, Price said he thinks a full repeal of the physician payment system is likely by the end of the fiscal year (Sept. 30) and that it will be tied to extending funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)., which expires at the end of September (end of FY 2015).
Pennsylvanians who are more frequently admitted to the hospital claim a disproportionate amount of public health money, according to a recent study by a state health cost-tracking agency. Research published earlier this month by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, or PHC4, shows patients admitted into a hospital five times or more between July 2013 and June 2014 comprised only 3 percent of total inpatient admissions. But those 3 percent ate up 14 percent, or $545 million, of all inpatient Medicare claims payments and 17 percent — or $216 million — of all inpatient Medicaid claims payments.
Linda Mason held two bottles of medications she couldn't see. Dressed in a patient gown, she sat in a room after being told she was discharged from the hospital. Disabled and blind, she was told to have her caregiver read the instructions on how to administer the medications. Then she was left alone. After a passer-by lent her a cellphone, Mason called her 89-year-old mother, who found a friend to bring her to the hospital to pick her up. It then took an hour for her mother to find someone to explain the discharge instructions.