During the design and passage of the Affordable Care Act, its architects and supporters described a fantastic new system for buying insurance. You would go onto a website and enter some simple information about yourself. The computer system would fetch data about you from various places -- it would verify income with the Internal Revenue Service, check with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that you were a citizen or legal resident, and tap a database of employer coverage to make sure that you were not already being offered affordable coverage (defined as 9.5 percent of your income or less) by your employer.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Nineteen cancer and patient advocacy organizations have launched a web site to help patients choose insurance plans in the new health insurance marketplaces that will begin next week. CancerInsurance Checklist.org is a free resource -- paid for with a grant from Novartis Oncology, a division of the drug manufacturer Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. -- and is geared toward people with cancer, a history of cancer or a risk of cancer who will be picking new health coverage through insurance plans that will be available for purchase Oct. 1 under the Affordable Care Act.
Of the more than 8,000 physicians licensed to work in the nation's capital, only 453 of them are primary-care doctors who spend more than 20 hours a week seeing patients, according to a report released Wednesday by the D.C. Board of Medicine. The number of actively practicing primary-care doctors comes from a survey conducted when doctors renewed their licenses last year. It puts a number on a complaint that patients and health-care providers have long had: It's hard to find a doctor in Washington.
Meaningful Use Stage 2 has made patient portals a "must-have" technology for doctors and hospitals, according to a KLAS Research survey of more than 200 providers. But the respondents indicated that most of these portals do not yet satisfy their needs in areas such as patient engagement. Another key finding of the survey: providers are gravitating toward portals that are designed for and integrated with their EHRs. Patient portals that merely can be interfaced with a variety of EHRs, such as those from MedSeek and Intuit, are losing market share. In fact, not enough MedSeek customers were included in the survey sample to rank the product.
FORTUNE -- Our country is facing a health care crisis. States are divided on Obamacare and Medicaid, and new legislation is not making any clear progress in increasing access to affordable health care. According to findings by the Urban Institute, nearly two out of every three uninsured low-income individuals — some 9.7 million people — who would have qualified for subsidized coverage under Obamacare might not receive it next year because their states have not expanded Medicaid. Also, according to a study by The Association of American Medical Colleges, we'll be facing a shortage of more than 90,000 doctors in the next five years.
According to the nurse's note, the patient had received a clean bill of health from his regular doctor only a few days before, so I was surprised to see his request for a second opinion. He stared intently at my name badge as I walked into the room, then nodded his head at each syllable of my name as I introduced myself. Shifting his gaze upward to my face, he said, "I'm here, Doc, to make sure I don't have anything serious. I'm not sure my regular doctor was listening to everything I was trying to tell him."