Last week U.S. News and World Report released its annual list of "Best Hospitals." Web sites are being updated to celebrate victories. (Johns Hopkins ranks No. 1!) Magazines will be plump with advertising. (NewYork-Presbyterian is first in New York and tied for seventh nationally!) And, because I am a reporter covering health care, my in-box is accumulating e-mails from the "Honor Roll" of the Top 18 hospitals. But what does this annual exercise mean for patients? And what does it say about American health care? After all, Harvard and Princeton, which tied for No. 1 in the magazine's 2013 Top 10 national universities list, didn't take out ads to proclaim their triumph; they will fill their classrooms no matter.
WASHINGTON — As state health exchanges continue to announce lower-than-expected rates for health insurance, experts say both state and regional issues play a part in how much a consumer will pay for insurance beginning in January. Several factors come into play: a state's regulations, how many insurers will participate in the state and federal exchanges, and what kind of a risk those insurers are willing to take. "There is tremendous existing variation within the rates in the states now," said Sherry Glied, professor of health policy and economics at Columbia University and former assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. "It's hard to compare the old rates to the new."
At the headquarters of Public Health — Seattle & King County in downtown Seattle, those leading the county's effort to get people to sign up for insurance under the new federal health-care law are conspiring around a table. Maybe they could get singer Dave Matthews to urge everyone to get covered, one suggests. Macklemore, sighs a young woman, intoning in a hushed, reverent voice the name of the rising star of Seattle rap and social justice. For the growing campaign to enroll the uninsured in health insurance as part of the monumental health-care overhaul, signing up healthy young adults — the "young invincibles" — is crucial to success.
Near the end of last year, a big finance company in Charlotte, N.C., was doing what a lot of other businesses have been doing recently: switching up their health care offerings. "Everything was changing, and we would only be offered two choices and each were a high-deductible plan," says Marty Metzl, whose husband works for the company. High-deductible plans are the increasingly common kind of health insurance that have cheaper premiums than traditional plans, but they put you on the hook for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs before the insurance kicks in.
The California Hospital Association filed a ballot initiative Thursday aimed at ensuring hospital funds intended to pay for care provided to Medi-Cal patients are not diverted by lawmakers for other purposes. About 800,000 signatures will be needed to qualify the measure for the November 2014 ballot. If approved by voters, the measure would prohibit the governor and the Legislature from imposing a provider fee on hospitals unless the money and matching federal funds are used to pay for hospital care provided to Medi-Cal patients.
We usually assume that new medical procedures and drugs are adopted because they are better. But a new analysis has found that many new techniques and medicines are either no more effective than the old ones, or worse. Moreover, many doctors persist in using practices that have been shown to be useless or harmful. Scientists reviewed each issue of The New England Journal of Medicine from 2001 through 2010 and found 363 studies examining an established clinical practice. In 146 of them, the currently used drug or procedure was found to be either no better, or even worse, than the one previously used. The report appears in the August issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.