If you were led blindfolded a few blocks east from Los Angeles' grand City Hall, you would know instantly when you entered Skid Row. There is the pungent smell of urine and marijuana smoke, and the sound of music and easy laughter — a carnival rising out of misery. This is the chaos that Chris Mack plunges into on most days. Once homeless himself, Mack is an outreach worker for the JWCH Institute's Center for Community Health, a free clinic in the heart of Skid Row. Mack is part of a concerted push to enroll the nation's homeless in Medicaid.
Nearly two out of every three people signing up for health care coverage so far on Maryland's troubled insurance exchange qualified for Medicaid — helping the state top its goal for the program's enrollment. Enrolling more lower-income residents in the state and federal insurance program has been embraced by state leaders as a success amid all the exchange's difficulties. Launched Oct. 1 to offer Maryland's uninsured access to coverage, the exchange has been plagued by problems that state officials only recently said they mostly fixed — days before the deadline to sign up for coverage starting with the new year. The state has been expanding Medicaid coverage to more residents for years in an effort to reduce health care costs for all. Getting people into insurance is expected to help them better manage chronic conditions and to limit expensive visits to emergency rooms.
In 2014, healthcare technology leaders will be wishing, and working, for improvement in the healthcare system and the technologies to support it. I asked 10 CIOs and other health tech leaders for one or two pithy thoughts about what they would like to see in the new year. Here are their responses -- some as bullet points and others as longer prose -- via email, lightly edited: John Halamka, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: Halamka is one of the most prominent CIOs in all of healthcare and anoccasional contributor to InformationWeek Healthcare.
Echoing other complaints across the country, two Charlotte-area emergency room doctors allege the for-profit company that owns hospitals in Mooresville and Statesville offered them illegal kickbacks to order unnecessary tests and admit more patients to increase corporate revenues. Drs. Thomas Mason and Steven Folstad, of Mid-Atlantic Emergency Medical Associates, filed the lawsuit in 2010 in U.S. District Court in Charlotte against Lake Norman Regional Medical Center in Mooresville, Davis Regional Medical Center in Statesville, and their owner, Health Management Associates, the fourth-largest for-profit hospital chain with 71 hospitals in 15 states.
Obamacare just got real. Sure, there were some new rules and benefits over the last few years, but that was just a warmup. Starting today, all of the big pieces of the Affordable Care Act ? the biggest domestic achievement of Barack Obama's presidency and one of the most far-reaching changes in American social policy in decades ? go into effect. And Americans will start to see, for better or worse, how the law really works. Private health coverage starts for more than 2 million Americans who managed to get through that federal enrollment website or the state-run versions. People with pre-existing conditions can't be turned down anymore. Subsidies will start to help low- and middle-income people pay for their insurance.
Hospitals and medical practices across the United States braced for confusion and administrative hassles as new insurance plans under President Barack Obama's healthcare law took effect on Wednesday. More than 2 million people enrolled in private plans offered under the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, during the initial sign-up period for health benefits. Enrollment began in October and lasts through March, but Americans in most states had to enroll by last week to get coverage that takes effect with the start of the new year. A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said there were no hiccups to report in the first day the plans were in effect.