The patient is an addict. His doctor is an addict, too. Over the last decade, both men hit their own versions of rock bottom. For the patient, it was the concrete floor of a jail where he writhed in withdrawal. For the doctor, it was the food stamp office where, his career as a child psychiatrist in tatters, he ashamedly sought help. Then they both found buprenorphine, the patient as a user, the doctor as a prescriber. And because of that drug, an opioid used to treat opioid addiction, they both rebounded, even thrived.
President Obama nominated Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, an early supporter and grass-roots advocate for the Affordable Care Act, as surgeon general on Thursday. Dr. Murthy, 36, is a founder and the president of Doctors for America, a group that campaigned for the health care law before Congress passed it in 2010. He is a doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Last year, he was the co-author of an article for The New Republic responding to criticism of the health care law and citing its support among doctors, although it acknowledged qualms among them.
Remember when President Obama said, "If you like your health plan you can keep it?" Now it's more like, "If you like your health plan you can keep it — for another year, and only if your insurance company says it's OK." It's not clear whether the administration's proposal to let insurers extend the policies they've been canceling for the past couple of months will solve the president's political problem. But it's sure not going over very well with the insurance industry. "Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers," Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's trade group, said in a statement Thursday.
More hospitals are receiving penalties than bonuses in the second year of Medicare's quality incentive program, and the average penalty is steeper than it was last year, government records show. Medicare has raised payment rates to 1,231 hospitals based on two-dozen quality measurements, including surveys of patient satisfaction and—for the first time—death rates. Another 1,451 hospitals are being paid less for each Medicare patient they treat. For half the hospitals, the financial changes that started last month are negligible: they are gaining or losing less than a fifth of one percent what Medicare otherwise would have paid. Others are experiencing greater swings.
Despite the negative attention Obamacare has had recently, Obamacare will also help create many new jobs in the healthcare arena in our country due to the shortage of coders in the healthcare industry. Under Obamacare, roughly 40 million new patients will enter our healthcare system and that will create the need to code hundreds of millions of new charts each year. Under ICD-10 productivity estimates, a coder will take half an hour to code an average outpatient chart and an hour on average to code an inpatient chart. Think of the millions of new coders and billers that will have to be hired within the healthcare industry over the next 5 years.
Authorities in California shut down 10 fake Obamacare websites, amid nationwide concern among law enforcement officials about potential fraud during the program's rollout, the state's attorney general said on Thursday. The sites, which mimicked the official "Covered California" affordable health insurance website, were removed from the internet in an effort to stop fraud connected to the rollout, said a spokesman for California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who ordered the sites to close after a month-long investigation. "These websites fraudulently imitated Covered California in order to lure consumers away from plans that provide the benefits of the Affordable Care Act," Harris said in a statement. "My office will continue to investigate and shut down these kinds of sites."