Johnson & Johnson agreed to resolve criminal and civil probes into the marketing of Risperdal, an antipsychotic drug, and other medicines by paying more than $2.2 billion, one of the largest U.S. health-fraud penalties. J&J's Janssen unit will plead guilty to a misdemeanor criminal charge over misbranding Risperdal for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, including treating elderly patients with dementia. Under a plea agreement announced today, Janssen will pay a $334 million fine and forfeit $66 million.
Now is when Americans start figuring out that President Barack Obama's health care law goes beyond political talk, and really does affect them and people they know. With a cranky federal website complicating access to new coverage and some consumers being notified their existing plans are going away, the potential for winners and losers is creating anxiety and confusion. "I've had questions like, 'Are they going to put me in jail if I don't buy insurance? Because nobody will sell it to me,'" said Bonnie Burns, a longtime community-level insurance counselor from California. "We have family members who are violently opposed to 'Obamacare' and they are on Medicaid — they don't understand that they're already covered by taxpayer benefits.
Despite all of the glitches in HealthCare.gov and, to a lesser extent, state-run health insurance exchange sites, 21% of adults who visited the state and federally operated health insurance marketplaces enrolled in a health plan, a new Commonwealth Fund survey found. Those who did not enroll said they were not sure they could afford a plan (48%), were still deciding on a plan (46%), had technical difficulties with the website (37%), or cited all three reasons. The nationally representative poll queried 680 people. Overall, 17% of Americans who are potentially eligible for coverage have visited the new health insurance marketplaces to buy coverage via e-mail, Internet, phone or in person, according to the research.
A doctor shortage is threatening to make the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act even more difficult — and it could create lines for care and services. New Yorkers are notorious for wanting things immediately, and that includes medical care . But even doctors who support Obamacare say there could be delays due to more patients and fewer doctors, CBS 2's Dick Brennan reported Monday. "It's like shopping during Christmas time. I mean, you're going to have a tough time if you have all of these people demanding services at the same time," said Dr. Steven Lamm of the NYU School of Medicine.
Because of mobile health apps and home monitoring, physicians will eventually see patients far less often for minor acute problems and followup visits than they do today, said three doctors from Scripps Health in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). But before that can happen, they cautioned, "real-world clinical trial evidence" is needed to confirm the benefits of mobile health apps for patients, clinicians and payers. The three cardiologists who wrote the commentary all work at the Scripps Translational Science Institute, which does clinical trials of mobile health applications and devices.
Florida and New York have roughly the same population, but New York has five times as many Medicare-sponsored residency training positions and seven times the Medicare funding graduate medical education. The numbers give a glimpse into the "imbalance" in how Medicare distributes its $10 billion a year for graduate medical education (GME), according to a study by George Washington University researchers published Monday in Health Affairs. New York state received 20 percent of all Medicare's graduate medical education funding while 29 states, including places struggling with a severe shortage of physicians, got less than 1 percent, the study said.