The Affordable Care Act gave states the option of creating their own online health-insurance exchanges or defaulting to a federal site to help uninsured Americans obtain coverage before the law?s individual mandate kicked in. Generally, the states whose political leaders opposed the health-care legislation refused to develop their own exchanges, leaving uninsured residents to seek coverage on the federal site. With some well-documented technical problems plaguing the federal exchange, those resistant states are now faring worse on average than their compliant counterparts in terms of enrollment numbers.
The race is on to get the federal insurance website HealthCare.gov working smoothly by the end of November. And it's not just because that's what federal officials have promised. December could see a surge in demand for health insurance. "There is an avalanche coming," says Bryce Williams, managing director for exchange solutions at the benefits consulting firm Towers Winston. Williams says the firm knows from years of experience with open enrollment for Medicare patients, that the Monday after Thanksgiving is always the single busiest day for business.
An Ohio legislative panel acted consistently with state law and standard practice when it approved a request to fund an expansion of the Medicaid program last month, state attorneys argued in a court filing Monday. Two anti-abortion groups and six Republican state representatives are suing the state Controlling Board and Ohio's Department of Medicaid over the decision that bypassed the General Assembly. They want the Ohio Supreme Court to order the board to declare its decision as void and stop Medicaid officials from using the board's approval to move forward with covering thousands more people under the federal-state health program.
Sean Kimball of Windsor had a retort ready when friends expressed their objections to the Affordable Care Act. The 2006 Massachusetts health law, later a model for the national one, provided his family with affordable coverage following a layoff. But lately the state's online insurance marketplace has not been working for Kimball — or for many other consumers. Since the state relaunched its insurance website Oct. 1 to comply with the national law, it has had persistent problems: links lead nowhere, technological failures lock users out or deliver inexplicable error messages, and consumers endure long wait times to speak with customer service representatives, who sometimes offer little more than a suggestion to try again later.
Emergency rooms in rural areas don't see many very sick or badly injured children each year. When they do, bringing in a pediatric critical care specialist by videoconference to help with treatment could prevent errors, a new study suggests. Researchers found rural ER doctors made errors in administering medication - such as giving the wrong dose or the wrong drug altogether - just 3 percent of the time when they used so-called telemedicine to connect with a specialist. That compared to an 11 percent error rate when local doctors talked with a specialist by phone and a 13 percent error rate when they didn't consult with a specialist at all.
Dirk Thompson III doesn't hold out much hope that he and the 750 other victims in a nationwide meningitis outbreak will ever see much, if any, compensation for the deaths and illnesses caused by tainted steroids. He hopes to find justice another way if criminal charges are brought against the principals of a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy that made the steroid injections blamed for the fungal meningitis outbreak. A federal grand jury in Boston has been investigating the New England Compounding Center for more than a year. A separate grand jury in Minnesota also has been conducting an investigation.