For six years, Mayra Martinez had been going to the same beautician in Queens, and considered her a friend. On Saturday, while getting her hair done, Ms. Martinez, 45, mentioned she had just gotten a new job. "Where?" the beautician asked. "Bellevue," Ms. Martinez said. "She just froze and asked, 'Are you anywhere near him?' " Ms. Martinez recalled. Then the beautician asked her to please find someone else to do her hair. By "him," the beautician meant Dr. Craig Spencer, who is New York's first Ebola patient. As Bellevue Hospital Center goes into its eighth day of treating Dr. Spencer, who had worked with Doctors Without Borders in Guinea, some of its employees are feeling stigmatized.
A year after the federal Affordable Care Act took effect, California voters are now considering another major change to health care: a ballot measure that would give state officials the authority to veto health insurance rate increases for individual and small group plans. Proposition 45 would hand broad new control of the individual health insurance market to the state insurance commissioner, who could reject rate increases deemed excessive. The measure is designed to keep costs down for consumers in a state where health care premiums have spiked in recent years, raising public ire.
Two Minnesota employees have filed complaints against Honeywell for its wellness program, and the federal government is suing to stop it. Court documents filed this month say that Honeywell, as part of its 2015 health benefit plan, requires employees and their spouses to take blood and medical tests that check for smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and other problems. The employees were told about the new procedures in August, and they have until Nov. 14 to undergo testing. If employees opt out of the tests, according to the documents, they can lose up to $1,500 in Health Savings Account contributions, as well as face a $500 charge to their medical plan, or a $1,000 tobacco surcharge.
Watson was center stage Tuesday at the 2014 Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit, but the IBM supercomputer was nowhere to be seen. While Clinic physicians demonstrated the potential for how Watson could one day boost the efficiency of electronic medical records and provide medical students with a deeper education, the star attraction was "in the cloud," as it were. No hardware to be found. That didn't detract from the show-and-tell of the possibilities that cognitive computing could hold for the future.
The day Medicare officials began discussing whether to set new coverage limits on a costly new prostate-cancer treatment, the official in charge emailed three colleagues to put a "close hold" on the process. That meant: Keep quiet until an announcement later that month. Yet by the end of that same day, June 7, 2010, shares of the company that made the treatment, Dendreon Corp.,had plunged 10%. Before long, federal investigators took notice. The trading in Dendreon around that time is now at the center of one of three federal probes exploring whether employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that oversees billions in health spending, have leaked news that ended up in the hands of Wall Street traders, according to people with direct knowledge of the investigations.
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Tuesday that all members of the armed services working in Ebola-stricken West African countries undergo mandatory 21-day quarantines upon their return to the United States. Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said that Mr. Hagel was expected to announce shortly that he would follow the recommendation. The recommendation follows a directive from Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, who has ordered a 21-day "controlled monitoring" period for Army personnel returning from the Ebola zone in West Africa.