Studies since the 1980s have shown that despite spending enormous sums on health care, Americans are less healthy than their counterparts in other developed countries. In the most recent studies comparing the United States to 17 other wealthy industrialized nations including France, Japan, Canada and Britain, Americans had a shorter life expectancy, higher rates of disease, the highest rates of infant mortality and the lowest chance over all of surviving to middle age. These dismal findings have so befuddled health care experts, policymakers and politicians that they have come to be known simply as "the American health care paradox," or among the more candid, "the U.S. healthcare disadvantage."
Since the introduction of the Meaningful Use Incentive Program, many hospitals and medical practices have been working hard to meet Stage 1 and 2 regulations on patient engagement. In Stage 1 MU, for instance, providers have had to provide patients with electronic copies of their diagnostic test results, medication lists, allergies, discharge summary, procedures, and related information -- if they request them. They've been required to provide this information to more than half of all patients who request it within three business days. Stage 2 takes patient engagement to the next level. The regs say more than 50 percent of all unique patients seen by clinicians should be offered timely online access to their health information.
Two New York doctors have admitted they took $100,000 in cash payoffs from a medical lab to order lab tests on their patients. Dr. Gary Leeds and Dr. Richard Goldberg told a federal judge in Newark, N.J., that they had accepted the bribes, a U.S. attorney spokesman said Thursday. The arrest of the two doctors now brings to nine the number of physicians who have pleaded guilty in the growing lab scandal. More than a dozen executives and workers with Biodiagnostic Laboratory Services in Parsippany have also pleaded guilty.
BRAVE. You hear that word a lot when people are sick. It's all about the fight, the survival instinct, the courage. But when Dr. Elizabeth D. McKinley's family and friends talk about bravery, it is not so much about the way Dr. McKinley, a 53-year-old internist from Cleveland, battled breast cancer for 17 years. It is about the courage she has shown in doing something so few of us are able to do: stop fighting. This spring, after Dr. McKinley's cancer found its way into her liver and lungs and the tissue surrounding her brain, she was told she had two options.
After they get the website fixed, then what? Keeping your doctors and hospitals may be the next vexing challenge for Americans in the new health plans created by President Barack Obama's law. Obama promised people could keep their doctors. But in many states the new plans appear to offer a narrow choice of hospitals and doctors. Overall, it's shaping up as less choice than what people get through Medicare or employer-based coverage. Also, it can get complicated tracking down which medical providers are in what plans.
States and insurers are already working to bail out President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul, anticipating the system's online insurance exchanges may not be ready by a critical December deadline. All of the alternatives have drawbacks. Insurance companies are hoping to bypass the troubled exchanges and directly enroll customers. While that strategy would ease access, it also might prevent consumers from shopping for the best deal, a cornerstone of Obamacare. States may extend special coverage for the chronically ill who are otherwise shut out of the market. That's if they can find the money.