When Dr. Herbert Pardes retired as president and chief executive of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in 2011, the institution honored him at its annual "Cabaret" fund-raiser. More than 1,000 guests dined on wild mushroom soup catered by the restaurateur Danny Meyer and listened to Kelli O'Hara, a star of "South Pacific," serenade them with Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim and Berlin. But there were more thanks to come. Three years after retirement, Dr. Pardes is still employed by the hospital as the executive vice chairman of its board of trustees, a position that compensation experts say is rare in the nonprofit world, though much more common in for-profit companies.
The growth of federal spending on health care will continue to decline as a proportion of the overall economy in the coming decades, in part because of cost controls mandated by President Obama's health care law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday. The budget office said in its annual 25-year forecast that federal spending on major health care programs would amount to 8 percent of gross domestic product by 2039, one-tenth of a percentage point lower than its previous projection.
The sanctions, estimated to total $330 million over a year, kick in at a time when most infections measured in hospitals are on the decline, but still too common. In 2012, one out of every eight patients nationally suffered a potentially avoidable complication during a hospital stay, the government estimates. Even infections that are waning are not decreasing fast enough to meet targets set by the government. Meanwhile new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are making infections much harder to cure.
Timothy Jackson was hospitalized for more than 10 days after he was shot Dec. 22. His family was never allowed to see him. He died late at night on Jan. 2. The family was notified of his death shortly after. Months after the death, the family remains angry. His brother Jimmy Jackson said he and his parents didn't get to see Timothy in his final days. They didn't get to say goodbye. "We wanted to be with him," Jimmy Jackson said, "but they won't let us."
Remember all those predictions that Obamacare was going to create a crush of pent-up medical demand? All these millions of newly insured people were not only going to pack doctors’ offices, but they were all going to be sick with all sorts of untreated illnesses like diabetes and clogged arteries? That doesn’t seem to have happened, according to a new report. In fact, visits appear to be down slightly over 2013, before 9 million people or more gained fresh insurance under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the team at Athenahealth found.
More than 80,000 additional Texans have enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program since the rollout of the Affordable Care Act last fall despite Republican state leaders’ decision not to expand eligibility to poor adults, according to federal figures. The 80,435 new enrollees as of May — mostly Texans who already qualified for coverage but did not previously seek it — represent a 1.8 percent increase over pre-Obamacare figures. That places Texas, which has the nation’s highest uninsured rate, in the middle of the pack among states that chose not to expand access to those programs to everyone under 138 percent of the federal poverty line under the president's signature health law