Obama administration officials on Wednesday said an improved HealthCare.gov website should be able to break its own record for online traffic next month, when consumers begin using the site to enroll in private health insurance for 2015. Andrew Slavitt, a top U.S. official working to implement the law known as Obamacare, said the goal for traffic capacity is "significantly more than on the highest peak day." That peak day was March 31, the last official day for 2014 enrollments, when the site handled more than 125,000 users at a time, for a total daily volume of 4.8 million visitors.
Many Medicare beneficiaries treated at primarily rural "critical access" hospitals end up paying between two and six times more for outpatient services than do patients at other hospitals, according to a report released Wednesday by the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services. There are more than 1,200 critical access hospitals, which are generally the sole hospital in rural areas and can have no more than 25 beds. Medicare pays them more generously so they won't go out of business. In Illinois, 50 hospitals, more than a quarter, hold this designation.
Few women are on the list of doctors paid the most money by drug and medical device companies last year, according to a ProPublica analysis of new data released by the federal government. More than 90 percent of the 300 doctors who collected the most money for speaking and consulting are men, based on information from the new government database, called Open Payments. By comparison, men accounted for about 68 percent of active physicians in the United States in 2012, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. What we found adds to a growing body of evidence that male and female doctors are paid differently and may in fact practice medicine differently, though the reasons for the discrepancy are not completely clear.
On Tuesday, the American College of Surgeons released a surgical protocol for operating on patients with possible or confirmed cases of Ebola. Written by Sherry M. Wren, professor of surgery at Stanford, and Adam Kushner, an associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the protocol calls for special surgery equipment, including double gloves, full face shields and surgical hoods. Additionally surgeons must have what is termed as "AAMI Level 4" surgical gowns and drapes, which are made of material that have been proven to be impervious to liquid and viral penetration.
Massachusetts has launched a new era of shopping. It began last week. Did you notice? Right this minute, if you have private health insurance, you can go to your health insurer's website and find the price of everything from an office visit to an MRI to a Cesarean section. For the first time, health care prices are public. It's a seismic event. Ten years ago, I filed Freedom of Information Act requests to get cost information — nothing. Occasionally over the years, I'd receive manila envelopes with no return address, or secure .zip files with pricing spreadsheets from one hospital or another.
To combat "doctor shopping," "pill mills," and addiction to medications such as pain and anti-anxiety pills, many states have created databases that track the doctors who prescribe and patients who take these medications. Used by pharmacies and practices to ensure consumers aren't seeing multiple physicians to get controlled substances, these databases also have become a tool for law enforcement -- and at least one medical board's investigative arm. But could investigators' access to these records, which also include non-controlled medications, jeopardize patient privacy, especially when data segues from deidentified to clearly identified information and patients are called upon to hand over their complete medical records as part of an investigation?