Even though health-care spending has slowed substantially since the recession, it's still taking up an increasing slice of workers' paychecks and employers' expenses. For workers, dollars that go to medical care don't go to buying new cars or family vacations. For employers, the costs may limit hiring or investing in new equipment. The chart below shows health-care spending by employers and households, relative to wages, over the past quarter century. It includes contributions to insurance plans, Medicare taxes, and out-of-pocket costs. All the values are indexed to 100 to show how they've changed in relation to each other.
The federal government's effort to reveal the financial entanglements between doctors and drug companies is proving to be a long, hard slog. It's been four years since the Physician Payments Sunshine Act was passed by Congress as part of the same legislation approving President Obama's health care reform package. The act requires pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and medical purchasing companies to report any payments, including meals and honoraria, that they've provided to doctors and teaching hospitals. In addition, the companies must report any physicians who have an ownership interest in their business.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is pressing the international community to urgently respond to a shortage of doctors, nurses and equipment to stem the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Ban said at a news conference Tuesday that a coordinated global response is essential. Ban announced that he has appointed U.N. public health expert David Nabarro to coordinate the world body's effort to fight Ebola after consulting with U.N. health chief Margaret Chan. Nabarro has led earlier U.N. efforts to combat infectious diseases, including SARS.
When Dr. Joshua Sharfstein first visited the Western Maryland Regional Medical Center one year ago, he thought he entered the wrong building. The hospital was too quiet. There were no patients in the halls. No crowds in the waiting rooms. The hospital's staff showed him entire wards that were being closed down. It was a great sign. "I left, and I described it as the 'anti-gravity zone' for healthcare," Sharfstein, the state of Maryland's health secretary, told Business Insider in an interview last week. "Just everything was incredible. I think they were pretty far out ahead of the country at that point."
Standard hospital hardware and software solutions, especially electronic health records, can cost billions of dollars and place incredible demands on data centers and the people who oversee them. Despite the fact that the purpose of these systems is to advance information flow across health care, they too often are "closed," a situation that few people appreciate. Meaning, data cannot be accessed and used by hospitals, providers, or patients as they see fit. While other industries are flourishing as a result of advances in data access and information flow, and consumer and social technology, health care lags. [Subscription Required]
Regulators need to provide a clearer direction for the 22-year-old federal program that provides drug discounts to safety net hospitals, researchers argued in a new paper. The RAND Corp. said the so-called 340B program faces uncertainty when it comes to eligibility and transparency that pose challenges to healthcare providers and drug companies. "Policymakers need a clear, objective description of the 340B program and the challenges it faces on the road ahead," said Andrew Mulcahy, the report's lead author, in a statement. "There are increasingly divergent views on the program's purpose and the role it should play in supporting safety net providers."