A 58-year-old Maryland woman breaks her ankle, develops a blood clot and, unable to find a doctor to monitor her blood-thinning drug, winds up in an emergency room 30 times in six months. A 55-year-old Mississippi man with severe hypertension and kidney disease is repeatedly hospitalized for worsening heart and kidney failure; doctors don't know that his utilities have been disconnected, leaving him without air conditioning or a refrigerator in the sweltering summer heat. A 42-year-old morbidly obese woman with severe cardiovascular problems and bipolar disorder spends more than 300 days in a Michigan hospital and nursing home because she can't afford a special bed or arrange services that would enable her to live at home.
This Reuters article about Healthcare.gov has been getting some attention. Alas, it's not very good, focusing on client-side optimizations that are probably unrelated to the federal health care Web site's early woes. Healthcare.gov's problems are almost certainly occurring at a deeper level in the system, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for an outsider to gauge how serious those problems are. To explain, let's do one of those analogy things. Say that Kathleen is planning a birthday party for herself. There are a bunch of tasks associated with the party that need to be done. For instance, guests have to be told where and when the party is and whether to bring gifts.
In New York state, it's all go. Two weeks before launch a call center in Albany, the capital, buzzed with workers answering questions on Obamacare. An instructor in an adjacent room trained new employees in the strange language of health-care acronyms (HIPAA, ACA, PHI, IAP and so on). New York, led by a Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, has implemented the president's health-care plan with gusto. In preparation for the opening of the state's new insurance exchange on October 1st, two dozen trainee "navigators"—that is, people who will help New Yorkers buy insurance on the exchange—were given a test question.
Nearly half of U.S. physician groups said they are still deciding whether to participate in the new health insurance exchange products, according to a survey by the Medical Group Management Association. Forty percent of the more than 1,000 medical groups surveyed said they are still weighing their options on whether to participate in the policies offered by insurers on the exchanges. More than 80 percent of those surveyed said they're concerned about the burden of patient collections on their practices and low provider reimbursement rates.
In an opinion pice published in USA Today, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius addresses complaints about the federal website used for health insurance enrollment. "When the Health Insurance Marketplace opened last week, demand was so high, it exceeded even optimists' expectations... Engineers are working day and night to make upgrades. We're adding more servers to enable the system to handle larger loads... This work is delivering results. Wait times on HealthCare.gov are now 50% shorter, and more people are enrolling in affordable coverage."
Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver announced last year that Warren Kortz, a general surgeon on the medical staff, was the first in the Rocky Mountain region to use a technique known as robotic surgery to remove gall bladders through one incision in the belly button. The operation, performed while the doctor sits at a video-game-like console, was "taking advantage of another breakthrough in robotic surgery" and is "easier on the patient," the hospital said in a press release. "It's Star Wars stuff," Kortz was quoted as saying in another article put out by the hospital touting another operation, robot-assisted parathyroid surgery, in 2010. "My prediction is it will eventually replace everything else."