A New York doctor who was diagnosed with Ebola after working with patients in West Africa will be released on Tuesday from a hospital where he has been treated for the disease, the hospital said. Dr. Craig Spencer, 33, had been held in isolation in Bellevue Hospital Center since he was diagnosed with Ebola on Oct. 23, after working with patients in Guinea with Médecins Sans Frontières. Spencer will join Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials and Bellevue staff at a news conference on Tuesday morning, the hospital said. Spencer is expected to make a statement but not take questions, the hospital said.
The trade group representing nurse practitioners is moving to position its members for a windfall of new jobs expected as part of an overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs’s healthcare system. VA Secretary Robert McDonald announced plans in September to hire tens of thousands of new clinicians as part of a plan to restructure the agency, following a scandal involving lengthy wait times at agency-run healthcare facilities that led to the ouster of his predecessor, Eric Shinseki. The VA is expected to put the plan into effect on Tuesday, which is Veterans Day.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell is expecting at least some snags during the second year of Obamacare sign-ups. "We will have things that won't go right. We will have outages, we will have downtime," Burwell said Monday in a discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress. Even after hundreds of federal workers spent months rebuilding the site, Burwell warned that some customers would run into glitches. "Something will happen. What we need to do is be transparent, be fast and get it fixed," Burwell said in one of her many public appearances ahead of open enrollment on Nov. 15.
The use of so-called narrow networks in health plans sold through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces has proved to be a controversial way of reducing premiums, especially since many of the new consumers were unaware they would have to pay more for medical services if they went "out of network," or the services wouldn't be covered at all. It turns out many physicians have been just as confused as consumers.
It doesn't seem like nurses are asking for too much as fears escalate over the spread of Ebola. They're concerned about safety — not just for themselves but for their patients and for the public. But hospital management hasn't responded. Neither has Congress nor the president. That's why some 100,000 registered nurses and nurse practitioners across the country, including 400 at a Washington, D.C., hospital, are going on strike, picketing or holding rallies and candlelight vigils as part of a national "Day of Action" Wednesday to protest their lack of protective gear and training for taking care of Ebola patients.
One longstanding concern about Medicaid is that too few doctors will accept it, because it tends to pay providers less generously than private plans do. This concern shows up in news articles about Medicaid, driven by evidence from doctors' offices. But if you ask Medicaid enrollees directly, they reveal that access to primary care is comparable to that for private plans. A report from the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services released in late September reinforced concerns about access to care for Medicaid enrollees.