The uninsured pour into Memorial Health hospital here: the waitress with cancer in her voice box who for two years assumed she just had a sore throat. The unemployed diabetic with a wound stretching the length of her shin. The construction worker who could no longer breathe on his own after weeks of untreated asthma attacks and had to be put on a respirator. Many of these patients were expected to gain health coverage under the Affordable Care Act through a major expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor.
President Barack Obama is finally saying he's sorry over one of his health care promises. But on Friday he was back pushing hard for his plan, CBS 2's Dick Brennan reported. The president was in New Orleans and despite his apology over his statements about his health care plan , he still took a shot at his critics. "I know health care is controversial, so there's only going to be so much support we get on that on a bipartisan basis until it's working really well. Then they are going to stop calling it Obamacare," the president said.
When Cynthia Edson learned how much her husband's employer-provided health insurance plan would change in 2014, she compiled a to-do list. Get a skin-cancer check and an appointment with a gynecologist. Renew and fill the family's prescriptions. Schedule a blood draw for her husband and youngest daughter. Edson sprang to action because her husband's employer drastically changed its health-insurance plan for 2014. Citing the nation's new health-care law, the company switched to a high-deductible plan that won't pay for medical care until the family spends $4,000 out of pocket.
The White House is increasing its reliance on insurers by accepting their technical help in efforts to repair the problem-ridden online health insurance marketplace and prioritizing consumers' ability to buy plans directly from the carriers. The Obama administration's broader cooperation with insurers is a tacit acknowledgment that the federal insurance exchange — fraught with software and hardware flaws that have frustrated many Americans trying to buy coverage — might not be working smoothly by the target date of Nov. 30, according to several health experts familiar with the administration's thinking. White House officials reject the idea that the strategy represents a contingency plan in the event that the online system continues to falter.
When Joe Atkins hunkered down to draft legislation outlining how Minnesota would implement the Affordable Care Act, he had no idea the results would be so dramatic. The Gopher State is now enrolling individuals through its health-insurance exchange by the thousands and at premium rates that are among the lowest in the country. Next door in Wisconsin, the numbers of Obamacare enrollees have barely hit the hundreds and rates are between 25 and 35 percent higher than in Minnesota. "I wish that wasn't the case, but I'm sure glad," says Atkins, a Democratic Farm Labor Party state lawmaker. "Folks are thinking I'm pretty smart right now."
Patients don't always know when their doctor has made a medical error. But other doctors do. A few years ago I called a Las Vegas surgeon because I had hospital data showing which of his peers had high rates of surgical injuries – things like removing a healthy kidney, accidentally puncturing a young girl's aorta during an appendectomy and mistakenly removing part of a woman's pancreas. I wanted to see if he could help me investigate what happened. But the surgeon surprised me. Before I could get a question out, he started rattling off the names of surgeons he considered the worst in town.