States that have refused to expand Medicaid, as requested as part of the Obamacare health reforms, say they can't afford to cover all the old, sick people who will be just waiting to get their free health care. But a new study contradicts this argument, saying the people who would become newly eligible for Medicaid are going to be younger white males who aren't sick yet? but who are more likely to be smokers and drinkers who would benefit from getting medical care now. "There are going to be many more males. They are going to be younger," says Dr. Tammy Chang of the University of Michigan, whose study is published in the Annals of Family Medicine.
(Reuters) - California said it is planning for a full launch of its Obamacare online health insurance exchange on October 1, after testing its functionality. Last month, the state said it was considering a soft launch of the exchange if tests showed it was not ready for wide public access. But tests of the system last week were encouraging, said Dana Howard, deputy director of communications for the Covered California exchange. "All of our testing so far indicates that there is not going to be a problem doing self-enrollment online on Oct 1," Howard said.
An internal investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs has found that one of its hospitals in Jackson, Miss., did not have enough doctors in its primary care unit, resulting in nurse practitioners' handling far too many patients, numerous complaints about delayed care and repeated violations of federal rules on prescribing narcotics. The investigation found no evidence that care had been compromised in the primary care unit, the vital first stop for many patients. But it concluded that there were enough problems "to suggest there may be quality of care issues that require further review," a copy of the investigators' report says.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Coping with advanced cancer, Bev Veals was in the hospital for chemo this summer when she got a call that her health plan was shutting down. Then, the substitute insurance she was offered wanted her to pay up to $3,125, on top of premiums. It sounds like one of those insurance horror stories President Barack Obama told to sell his health overhaul to Congress, but Veals wasn't in the clutches of a profit-driven company. Instead, she's covered by Obama's law — one of about 100,000 people with serious medical issues in a financially troubled government program.
United Healthcare, one of the two largest health insurers in the U.S., set an important precedent when it recently announced its introduction of an online bill payment service that enables United members to pay their bills to healthcare providers by credit card or bank transfer. United, which has integrated the online bill-pay capability with its claims processing system, is the first payer to supply a service of this kind, said Victoria Bogatyrenko, VP of products innovation for United, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. Although electronic claims submission, remittance advice and funds transfer have been widely adopted in the industry, the process of collecting the ever-increasing portion of payments that patients owe remains in the Middle Ages of technology.
A blood pressure check may be one of the most tried and true routines of a visit to the doctor's office. But a group of Allina Health doctors in Edina is challenging the reliability of the conventional test and is trying a new method they believe could provide a more accurate diagnosis for thousands of patients who suffer from hypertension. While few doubt that routine checks help millions of Americans control their high blood pressure, there is growing evidence that these point-in-time readings overdiagnose some patients — people whose numbers go up at the doctors' office simply because of nerves — while underdiagnosing others whose hidden hypertension puts them at greater risk for stroke and heart disease.