A waiting room with no wait and a doctor who answers your texts and makes house calls may seem hard to imagine in today's world full of medical billing and insurance company navigation. A new trend in health care, concierge medicine, helps patients cut through the maze of pre-approvals and insurance company reimbursements. Patients who use concierge medicine pay a certain amount for a more personal and accessible relationship with their doctor. Connie Weiser of Butler Township is on board with the trend and is benefiting from immediate and undivided attention from her doctor. Barry Taylor, who is Weiser's doctor, is among a growing number across the country and in the Miami Valley trying this new approach to healthcare.
Say what you will about the Affordable Care Act, it has been a huge boon to hospitals and hospital stocks. The shares have surged this year for a simple reason: More patients have gone to hospitals for care, and thanks to the ACA, more can afford to pay for it. That has helped boost earnings at publicly traded hospital-management companies such as LifePoint Hospitals (ticker: LPNT), HCA Holdings (HCA), and Universal Health Services (UHS), whose shares have returned more than four times the gain in the Standard & Poor's 500. Some observers question whether the stocks already reflect all the good news, but their worries seem premature. [Subscription Required]
A new drug for the liver disease hepatitis C is scaring people. Not because the drug is dangerous — it's generally heralded as a genuine medical breakthrough — but because it costs $1,000 a pill and about $84,000 for a typical person's total treatment. A Washington advocacy effort has sprung up overnight, largely devoted to objecting to the cost of this one medication, Sovaldi. Members of Congress have started a joint investigation into how its maker, Gilead Sciences, settled on its price. "Clearly, $1,000 a pill strikes people as completely unreasonable," said John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, an advocacy group that has been raising an outcry about the drug's price as "unsustainable."
Advocates of the Affordable Care Act, focused until now on persuading people to buy health insurance, have moved to a crucial new phase: making sure the eight million Americans who did so understand their often complicated policies and use them properly. The political stakes are high, as support for the health care law will hinge at least partly on whether people have good experiences with their new coverage. Advocates of the law also say teaching the newly insured how to be smart health care consumers could advance the law's central goal of keeping costs down, such as by discouraging emergency room visits, while still improving care.
When Wendy Ellen Miller had a hip replacement at Greenwich Hospital last month, her husband, Andrew Tatarsky, expected to feel the same lost uncertainty he usually felt when a loved one underwent surgery. "You're sitting in the waiting room, wondering what's happening," said Tatarsky, 58, who lives in New York City. "You don't really know what's going on." But his experience this time around was different, due to a new program at Greenwich Hospital, which may expand to other hospitals in the region. The hospital offers a program that allows the family members of some surgery patients to receive updates about their progress via text message.
South Carolina hospital executives these days are like football coaches at halftime, making changes based on what the opposition threw at them in the first half while trying to anticipate the different tactics they might face in the second half. They aren't the only ones. Conflicting federal appeals court rulings last month — one said insurance subsidies are unconstitutional in states that don't run their own exchanges; another said the subsidies are permitted — could have even more impact on South Carolinians who bought health insurance policies through the Affordable Care Act.