Nurse practitioner and physician assistant (NP/PA) care in the ICU could have a mortality benefit compared with care teams solely comprising resident physicians, a study showed.
A measles outbreak that began at Disneyland is spreading across California and beyond, prompting health officials to move aggressively to contain it — including by barring unvaccinated students from going to school in Orange County. The outbreak has increased concerns that a longstanding movement against childhood vaccinations has created a surge in a disease that was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. Heath officials said 59 cases of measles had been diagnosed in California as of Wednesday, with an additional eight related cases spread through Utah, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and Mexico. Among those infected are five workers at Disneyland, where the outbreak was spotted in mid-December; 42 of the 59 California cases have been linked to the Disneyland outbreak.
Money talks. A temporary Medicaid pay raise that was part of President Barack Obama's health law made it easier for poor adults to get appointments with primary care doctors, according to a study published Wednesday. Paying more to doctors who participate in the federal-state insurance program for the poor usually improves access for patients, but the law's two-year limit on the raise, its slow rollout and other regulatory problems made many skeptical about how physicians would react to the extra money — which in many states equated to a 50 percent pay hike or more.
Schools reopened in Guinea this week, just as Mali became the region's latest country to be declared Ebola-free by the World Health Organization, following Nigeria and Senegal. The two developments are signs that life is slowly returning to normal as West Africa recovers from the world's worst-ever Ebola epidemic. It is far from over yet. But there is, at last, hope that the end of the outbreak may be within sight. There have been 21,614 cases of Ebola in this epidemic, and 8,594 deaths, according to the latest WHO figures. But crucially, the number of new cases is declining in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the countries worst affected.
Danielle Cagle got a plan with the Affordable Care Act this year to avoid the government's penalty but she says it's anything but affordable. Cagle, a Monroe insurance agent, falls within the generation dubbed millennials. Besides her experience with the Affordable Care Act, she has seen other millennials face high premiums when helping them with their insurance needs. The millennial advocacy organization Generation Opportunity said the Affordable Care Act has increased health care premiums for young people by up to 91 percent. "They're ridiculous. It's gotten so far out of hand it's basically not affordable for the working class. The deductible is so high people are getting it to avoid the penalty but they can't use it because the out-of-pocket exposure is unrealistic," Cagle said.
Hip and knee replacements, two of the fastest-growing U.S. medical procedures, are subject to huge - and apparently random - price variations within the same geographical areas, a new insurance industry study said on Wednesday. The study by Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurers adds to the evidence of massive disparities between what different hospitals and medical practices charge in the world's most expensive healthcare system. It examined claims in 64 healthcare markets over three years and found the biggest price swings for hip surgery in Massachusetts, where the same type of care varied by more than 313 percent, from a low of $17,910 to a high of $73,987.