After years of trying to clamp down on hospital spending, the federal government wants to get control over what Medicare spends on nursing homes, home health services and other medical care typically provided to patients after they have left the hospital. Researchers have discovered huge discrepancies in how much is spent on these services in different areas around the country. In Connecticut, Medicare beneficiaries are more than twice as likely to end up in a nursing home as they are in Arizona. Medicare spends $8,800 on each Louisiana patient getting home health care, $5,000 more than it spends on the average New Jersey senior.
Saturday is the day the Obama administration promised it would have HealthCare.gov working smoothly for the majority of people who need to sign up for health insurance. As the Obama administration scrambles to fix the glitch-plagued site, experts are beginning to worry about another problem that may further impair the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Health insurance companies say they're seeing numerous errors in a form that plays a vital part in the enrollment process. The problems are manageable so far, but many worry about what will happen if enrollment surges in the weeks to come.
With millions of Americans focused on the Affordable Care Act and the government's new healthcare website, there is a simple approach starting to gain traction that could help in bringing healthcare costs down. House calls used to be a common practice in the United States, and with emergency department admissions reaching an all time high, healthcare systems are struggling to keep costs down. Minnesota's North Memorial healthcare system is one of the first in the country to send physicians out to the homes of patients with chronic conditions.
Dr. Ted Mazer is one of the few ear, nose and throat specialists in this region who treat low-income people on Medicaid, so many of his patients travel long distances to see him. But now, as California's Medicaid program is preparing for a major expansion under President Obama's health care law, Dr. Mazer says he cannot accept additional patients under the government insurance program for a simple reason: It does not pay enough. "It's a bad situation that is likely to be made worse," he said.
The cheapest mid-range plan for a 50-year-old nonsmoker in Mississippi's most populous county costs $385 per month through the federal health insurance marketplace, nearly 40 percent higher than its equivalent in Kentucky. There, the same person can find a mid-range, or "Silver" plan, for as little as $278 per month. The annual savings between those two could purchase a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop, for example, or six weeks of groceries for the average family of four. Kentucky is the Southeast's only state running its own health care marketplace, and it has some of the region's least expensive plans, a Clarion-Ledger comparison found.
As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama's chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia. HealthCare.gov, the $630 million online insurance marketplace, was a disaster after it went live on Oct. 1, with a roster of engineering repairs that would eventually swell to more than 600 items. The private contractors who built it were pointing fingers at one another. And inside the White House, after initially saying too much traffic was to blame, Mr. Obama's closest confidants had few good answers.