Florida physicians have made the argument for years: The state's Medicaid payment rates are so low that many doctors wouldn't take patients covered under the program. But the federal Affordable Care Act provided a temporary solution. In 2013 and 2014, the law calls on the federal government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to boost the pay of primary-care physicians who provide much of the treatment for low-income Floridians enrolled in Medicaid. Now, however, Florida lawmakers and doctors face a dilemma. The federal government will stop covering the full cost of the physician pay increases at the end of next year.
Serious problems with the websites created by the Affordable Care Act continue, and probably will for a long time. Although frantic efforts at incrementally improving them are being made by the Obama administration, and some sites are working better than others, they are a long way from working well. As I've written before, the causes of the website's problems are far more serious than poor software design. They are baked into the law by its extreme complexity. There is growing frustration and anger at the administration in Congress from both Democrats and Republicans.
Homer "James" Rivera spent seven years waiting for a kidney, but the hospital called him Wednesday to cancel his Nov. 20 transplant because of a possible hospital workers' strike. "I was just devastated that a week to transplant, they tell me they're going to cancel," Rivera, 37, of San Diego, told ABCNews.com. "I was infuriated. I was calling and emailing anybody I could. There's got to be a way to get around this." The University of California San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest said it had to cancel the transplant because of an impending union strike. The one-day strike is the result of a disagreement over "reckless and unsafe staffing," according to a statement the health care workers' union AFSCME gave to ABC affiliate KGTV in San Diego.
Millions of Americans going for an annual checkup in 2014 will come away from the doctor's office with a new prescription to lower their cholesterol, a move cardiologists say will avert heart attacks and strokes. New guidelines released by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology will expand the use of statin drugs to almost 1 in 3 Americans from 16 percent currently. Everyone older than 40 with diabetes and those diagnosed with heart disease should be on a statin, regardless of their cholesterol count, the recommendations say.
Milwaukee's police chief defended the actions of two officers who took a felon into custody Thursday in the neonatal wing of Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, an arrest that resulted in the man being shot after he allegedly fled down a hallway brandishing a semi-automatic pistol. Police shot the 22-year-old man twice in the arm, causing him to drop his weapon. No one else was in the hallway at the time, and no officers, hospital employees or patients were hurt.
Saying "we fumbled the rollout," President Barack Obama announced a fix to the vexing problem of canceled health insurance policies Thursday. He told insurers they don't have to cancel plans next year just because of the Affordable Care Act. Insurers can continue the plans for 2014 on two conditions — they have to tell people what their plans don't cover, and they have to let people know they do have the option of going onto the health insurance exchanges to buy new plans with federal government subsidies and perhaps go onto Medicaid. "Insurers can extend current plans that otherwise would have been canceled in 2014," Obama said.