When it comes to health care, all anyone can talk about these days is Obamacare. And, while that may be understandable, the political furor over the program has obscured a quieter but arguably more consequential development: health-care costs in this country may finally be coming under control. As a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers details, after half a century in which medical spending has well outpaced G.D.P. growth, something has changed. From 2007 to 2010, per-capita health-care spending rose just 1.8 per cent annually. Since then, the annual increase has been a paltry 1.3 per cent.
Lily Bush spends dozens of hours a week learning how to dispense medications, draw blood, dress wounds, become an expert in anatomy, deal with family members and the hundreds of other skills a registered nurse is supposed to master. There's always something more to learn and another chapter to study. For years, the demands of a nursing education also brought a reward. It was a recession-proof career, a lure for generations of students. "I knew going into school I was choosing a safe major, because all you heard is how badly hospitals needed nurses," said Bush, a junior at Indiana University School of Nursing.
The impact of patient portal use on health outcomes is unclear, according to a systematic review of studies. Moreover, the researchers said, the evidence to date shows that portals are unlikely to have substantial effects on efficiency and utilization of services, at least in the short term. Physicians' use of patient portals is growing rapidly, because Meaningful Use Stage 2 requires providers to share records electronically with patients. It's widely believed that these portals can help increase patient engagement in healthcare, so the evidence about the actual effects of patient portals is important.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a broad new legal challenge to President Barack Obama's 2010 healthcare law. The court rejected a petition filed by Liberty University, a Christian college in Virginia, which had raised various objections to the law, including to the key provision that requires individuals to obtain health insurance. The justices upheld the constitutionality of a the individual mandate in a 5-4 ruling in June 2012. Last week, the court agreed to hear two new cases in which employers have made religious objections to regulations implemented under Obamacare that require employers to provide health insurance that includes contraception for women.
Before undergoing an MRI, a CT scan or a surgery to clean up that wobbly knee, consumers had better become accustomed to hearing: "How do you intend to pay for that?" As more Americans move into health insurance plans that require them to foot a larger portion of the bill for their care, hospitals are taking steps to ensure that consumers live up to their end of the bargain. Many health systems and physician groups are adopting new strategies to ensure that they'll collect for providing health services, including asking patients for payment before treatment and hiring contractors to enroll patients in payment plans.
Anyone faced with a life-threatening or chronic illness should be so lucky as Catherine, a 27-year-old waitress in New York. Dr. Diane E. Meier, a palliative care specialist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, recalled her young patient's story in an article published in 2011 in The Journal of Clinical Oncology. Catherine, who was not further identified to preserve her privacy, was diagnosed with leukemia and suffered intractable bone pain, unrelieved by acetaminophen with codeine. Palliative care physicians like Dr. Meier focus on the relief of that suffering, and not just for the dying. All patients deserve palliative care whether they are terminally ill, expected to recover fully, or facing years with debilitating symptoms of a chronic or progressive disease.