This weekend marks 100 days until people can begin signing up for new health insurance coverage under the federal health care law. It also marks another milestone: the launch of an enormous public relations effort to find people eligible for new coverage and urge them to sign up when the time comes. But like everything else about the health law, even this seemingly innocuous effort has been touched by controversy. Somewhere around 30 million Americans will be eligible to enroll in state health insurance exchanges beginning Oct. 1. But lots of those people don't know it. Earlier this spring, one poll found that weren't sure whether the Affordable Care Act was still a law or not.
More than 700 doctors nationwide wrote prescriptions for elderly and disabled patients in highly questionable and potentially harmful ways, according to a report of Medicare's drug program released Thursday. The review by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services flags those doctors as "very extreme" in their prescribing and says Medicare should do more to investigate or stop them. The study mirrors a ProPublica investigation published in The Washington Post last month. That report found that Medicare had not protected patients from doctors and other health-care professionals prescribing large quantities of potentially harmful, disorienting or addictive drugs.
(WASHINGTON) — There's no guarantee that President Barack Obama's health care law will launch smoothly and on time, congressional investigators say in the first in-depth independent look at its progress. But in a report to be released Wednesday, the congressional Government Accountability Office also sees positive signs as the Oct. 1 deadline approaches for new health insurance markets called exchanges to open in each state — in many cases over the objections of Republican governors. Additionally, the report discloses that the administration had spent nearly $400 million as of March to set up the infrastructure of a sprawling system involving major federal agencies, every state, hundreds of insurance companies, and millions of citizens, among them many individuals seeking coverage for the first time.
A growing number of small businesses have tried to reduce their health-care costs in recent years by replacing traditional insurance with self-insured plans. That means that instead of buying policies from big insurers such as Aetna (AET) or WellPoint (WLP), the company sets aside money to pay for workers' medical claims directly. The practice is common at big companies, where a large number of claims make it easier to predict health-care costs. Most small employers, who can face exploding health bills from a single unexpected illness or injury, have still stuck to conventional insurance.
Right now, we simply don't have enough doctors to deliver high-quality primary care. Add to this the 25 million uninsured Americans who will have access to care in January when the Affordable Care Act goes into effect and we have the makings of a disaster. Medical schools across the country are doing an exceptionally poor job of addressing this shortage. Their press releases tout large numbers of medical students going into residencies that produce primary care doctors, yet these numbers are grossly misleading.
A state judge has ordered Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn to keep up its level of staffing after complaints by hospital workers that the State University of New York was allowing it to wither away even as officials publicly claimed they were doing everything possible to keep it open. After a hearing in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn Wednesday, the judge, Johnny Lee Baynes, signed an order saying the hospital, in Cobble Hill, should maintain staffing on par with what it was before SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which operates it, first moved to close it earlier this year.