Helping hospitalized patients get a better night's sleep and reducing the amount of pain they're in may be as simple as exposing them to more natural light, according to a study published online this week in the Journal of Advanced Nursing. A team of researchers led by Esther Bernhofer, a nursing education specialist at the Cleveland Clinic who specializes in pain management, sought to find out what role, if any, the hospital lighting environment played in a patients' mood, sleep, and pain while they were in the hospital. Between May 2011 and April 2012, they collected data from 23 women and 17 men admitted to a large academically affiliated U.S. hospital.
Palmetto Primary Care Physicians will launch a new in-house health insurance plan next month for its employees because BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina's rates have become too expensive, the group's CEO said Tuesday. The in-house plan will reduce health insurance costs for the practice's 600 employees by as much as 85 percent per pay period, said spokeswoman Vivian Barajas. "The savings on my end is over 50 percent," she said. "It's kind of like getting a mini-raise for us."
Marilyn B. Tavenner, the official in charge of President Obama's health insurance marketplace, apologized on Tuesday to millions of Americans who have been frustrated in trying to buy insurance under the new health care law. Ms. Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that "nearly 700,000 applications have been submitted to the federal and state marketplaces" in the last four weeks. But she repeatedly refused to say how many of those people had actually enrolled in health insurance plans since the federal and state marketplaces, or exchanges, opened on Oct. 1.
More than 700,000 people have created accounts to buy health insurance on state and federal health care exchanges since they opened Oct. 1, the director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Tuesday, although the site has been plagued by problems. Marilyn Tavenner apologized for the site's problems in her testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, but said the agency is steadily adding more capacity to the system. "The experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans," Tavenner said.
Allowing Americans more time to enroll for health coverage under Obamacare may raise premiums and cut into profits, insurers are telling members of Congress in a bid to stop such a move. Extending the enrollment period would have a "destabilizing effect on insurance markets," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the Washington-based lobbyist group American's Health Insurance Plans. Allowing younger, healthy Americans to sign up later, as they probably would, means less revenue for insurers counting on those premiums to help defray the cost of sicker customers, threatening industry profits.
As the public face of President Barack Obama's signature health care program, Kathleen Sebelius has become the target for attacks over its botched rollout. Republicans want her to resign and even some Democrats — while not mentioning Sebelius — say someone should be fired. The secretary of Health and Human Services has been lampooned on late-night comedy shows, from "The Daily Show" to "Saturday Night Live," in which a stand-in Sebelius last week offered tips to people having trouble signing into the new health care website: restart your computer, send a postcard to Washington with the word "help" or buy an airline ticket to Canada.