President Barack Obama on Tuesday will press Congress to approve $6.18 billion in emergency funding to help fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and prepare U.S. hospitals to handle future cases. Most of the request is aimed at the immediate response to the disease at home and abroad. But the package also includes $1.5 billion in contingency funds - money that could become a target if lawmakers decide to trim the bill. "That is the part of the package that is most at risk," said Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, an alliance of U.S. non-governmental aid groups.
A surge in health insurer competition appears to be helping restrain premium increases in hundreds of counties next year, with prices dropping in many places where newcomers are offering the least expensive plans, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of federal premium records. KHN looked at premiums for the lowest-cost silver plan for a 40-year-old in 34 states where the federal government is running marketplaces for people who do not get coverage through their employers. Consumers have until Feb. 15 to enroll for coverage in 2015, the marketplace's second year. The number of insurers offering silver plans, the most popular type of plan in 2014, is increasing in two-thirds of counties, according to the analysis.
Just five years after direct health care practices were attracting venture capital money in Seattle, enrollees are dwindling. These practices, where patients pay a monthly fee for primary health care services, lost 35 percent of enrollees and raised their fees by 23 percent between 2012 and Dec. 1, 2014, according to a new report from the state's Office of the Insurance Commissioner. The best guess as to why this is happening? The Affordable Care Act. As more and more people are able to buy health insurance through state exchanges and Healthcare.gov and as some states have expanded Medicaid eligibility, patients who used to utilize these direct health care practices could be turning elsewhere for their treatment needs.
Networked medical devices are an important part of the current and future healthcare landscape, allowing for diagnostic analysis and therapeutic treatment options that are integral to our healthcare system. When a technology becomes fundamental to healthcare, the measures protecting it and its users merit thoughtful analysis and oversight. Recognizing this, federal agencies are now publicly acknowledging and seeking to address the potential threat to the privacy of personal medical information and to patients relying on networked medical devices for diagnosis and treatment. To help address these realities, the FDA is working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), medical device manufacturers, and healthcare professionals to identify and address the vulnerabilities of medical devices in our healthcare system.
When it comes to detecting breast cancer, doctors now have new ways to find tumors and save lives. CBS 2's Mary Kay Kleist checked out two of the latest technologies at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting at McCormick Place. This week, 47-year-old Jodi Thielemann will celebrate a life-changing anniversary. "I was diagnosed almost exactly a year ago," she says. She was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer. Jodi, like 40 percent of all women, has dense breasts. That put her more at risk for cancer. "The risk can be as high as four to six times," says Jessie Jacob, Chief Medical Officer of Breast Health, GE Healthcare.
Healthcare providers are increasingly recognizing that the cloud empowers them to reduce costs, enhance agility, and improve insights. And many now are investing more heavily and expanding their cloud initiatives. By 2020, 80% of healthcare data will "pass through the cloud at some point in its lifetime, as providers seek to leverage cloud-based technologies and infrastructure for data collection, aggregation, analytics and decision-making," according to IDC Health Insights. More exciting for IT professionals, that same year the US healthcare cloud market will reach $3.54 billion, compared with $903.1 million in 2013,Frost & Sullivan predicted.