During the past year, anxiety about the onset of Obamacare has created a chill in some parts of the economy. While large health care businesses — insurance companies, for instance, and hospital chains — have poured significant resources into preparing for millions of new customers, countless investors have appeared spooked by the perpetual threats to repeal, or at least revise, the law. According to Thomson Reuters, private equity investment, usually the lifeblood for entrepreneurialism, has dropped by an astonishing 65 percent in the health care sector this year.
Across Laurel Creek and down a dirt road in this sleepy valley town is the modest white house where Steve Day grew up. For more than 33 years, it was where he recuperated between shifts underground, mining the rich seams of the central Appalachian coalfields and doing his part to help make Peabody Energy Corp. the nation?s most productive coal company. Now, it?s where he spends most days and nights in a recliner, inhaling oxygen from a tank, slowly suffocating to death. More than a half-dozen doctors who have seen the X-ray and CT images of his chest agree he has the most severe form of black lung disease.
Helping hospitalized patients get a better night's sleep and reducing the amount of pain they're in may be as simple as exposing them to more natural light, according to a study published online this week in the Journal of Advanced Nursing. A team of researchers led by Esther Bernhofer, a nursing education specialist at the Cleveland Clinic who specializes in pain management, sought to find out what role, if any, the hospital lighting environment played in a patients' mood, sleep, and pain while they were in the hospital. Between May 2011 and April 2012, they collected data from 23 women and 17 men admitted to a large academically affiliated U.S. hospital.
Palmetto Primary Care Physicians will launch a new in-house health insurance plan next month for its employees because BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina's rates have become too expensive, the group's CEO said Tuesday. The in-house plan will reduce health insurance costs for the practice's 600 employees by as much as 85 percent per pay period, said spokeswoman Vivian Barajas. "The savings on my end is over 50 percent," she said. "It's kind of like getting a mini-raise for us."
Marilyn B. Tavenner, the official in charge of President Obama's health insurance marketplace, apologized on Tuesday to millions of Americans who have been frustrated in trying to buy insurance under the new health care law. Ms. Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that "nearly 700,000 applications have been submitted to the federal and state marketplaces" in the last four weeks. But she repeatedly refused to say how many of those people had actually enrolled in health insurance plans since the federal and state marketplaces, or exchanges, opened on Oct. 1.
More than 700,000 people have created accounts to buy health insurance on state and federal health care exchanges since they opened Oct. 1, the director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Tuesday, although the site has been plagued by problems. Marilyn Tavenner apologized for the site's problems in her testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, but said the agency is steadily adding more capacity to the system. "The experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans," Tavenner said.