Just a few days after President Obama said that millions of consumers should be able to keep their old insurance plans for another year — even if they did not meet the requirements of his health care law — he is finding support among states that would not exactly be described as allies. Of the 13 states that have so far said they will allow consumers to renew canceled plans, all but four are led by Republican governors and have generally been opposed to the new health care law.
Henry Chao, the Obama administration official who oversaw the technical development of the federal health insurance marketplace, said Tuesday that his team has yet to complete 30 to 40 percent of the overall project. Speaking before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Oversight Committee, Chao said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is still working on a number of "back office" aspects of the project, including a system to send payments to insurance companies. Parts of the project that users would see — notably the Web portal, HealthCare.gov — are 100 percent finished, he said. But "the accounting systems, the payment systems, they still need to be" completed, Chao said.
Medicare's effort to reward hospitals for quality is leaving many of the nation's safety-net hospitals poorer, a new analysis finds. Dr. Ashish K. Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has found that hospitals treating the most low-income patients on average had their payment rates reduced by 0.09 percent in the latest round of Medicare's program that rates hospitals' quality. The hospitals with the fewest low-income patients received an average bonus of 0.6 percent. Government-owned hospitals in particular fared poorly, with Medicare reducing their payment rates by 0.10 percent for a year, according to Jha's analysis, which he published Tuesday on his Harvard blog.
Many doctors are disturbed they will be paid less -- often a lot less -- to care for the millions of patients projected to buy coverage through the health law's new insurance marketplaces. Some have complained to medical associations, including those in New York, California, Connecticut, Texas and Georgia, saying the discounted rates could lead to a two-tiered system in which fewer doctors participate, potentially making it harder for consumers to get the care they need. "As it is, there is a shortage of primary care physicians in the country, and they don't have enough time to see all the patients who are calling them," said Peter Cunningham, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington D.C.
Johnson & Johnson and lawyers for patients injured by a flawed hip implant announced a multibillion-dollar deal on Tuesday to settle thousands of lawsuits, but it was not clear whether the deal would satisfy enough claimants. Under the agreement, the medical products giant would pay nearly $2.5 billion in compensation to an estimated 8,000 patients who have been forced to have the all-metal artificial hip removed and replaced with another device. Separately, the company has agreed to pay all medical costs related to such procedures, expenses that could raise the deal's cost to Johnson & Johnson to $3 billion, people familiar with the proposal said.
The Washington Healthplanfinder insurance exchange has a feature on its website that allows consumers to see if particular doctors and hospitals are in a plan's network of health-care providers. The provider directory is to help consumers compare plans on more than just price. The idea is that consumers who want to keep their doctor should be able to find out which plans allow them to do so. But the directory has been plagued with errors since the website was launched six weeks ago. The most serious problems have included listing some doctors and hospitals as outside a plan's network when they are actually in it.