Eligibility for Kentucky's Medicaid program is to be expanded starting in 2014. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear made the announcement Thursday during a news conference in Frankfort. On his official Twitter account, @GovSteveBeshear, Beshear said the move will provide health care coverage for more than 300,000 Kentuckians who are uninsured. Beshear has weighed the Medicaid expansion since the passage of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Under the act, Medicaid eligibility is supposed to be expanded to individuals who are at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Currently, there is no federal requirement that states provide coverage to individuals unless they have dependent children or are pregnant.
Hospital representatives flooded the halls of the General Assembly this week to lobby for more funding and against a proposal that would allow same-day surgery centers to sidestep the state's certification process. Members of the N.C. Hospital Association told lawmakers they have been hit hard by federal and state cutbacks and that losing surgery patients to stand-alone centers could cost them as much as $400 million a year."We are struggling; that's the main message I want legislators to hear," said Tim Rice, chief executive officer of Greensboro-based Cone Health, a member of the N.C. Hospital Association delegation that met with Senate Leader Phil Berger, House Speaker Thom Tillis and other legislators.
Your doctor may not be the biggest fan of the coming electronic health care wave, but marrying mobile technologies with medical know-how has the potential to save lives, dramatically improve patient care, and slash significant costs, even in the poorest urban communities in the world, a new study finds. Researchers at the New Cities Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Paris that seeks to tackle the most intractable issues facing the world's fastest-growing cities, joined by a small team of health-care workers from Rio de Janeiro, recently concluded an 18-month trial in one of the poorest parts of the city, the favela of Santa Marta, a community of 8,000.
From time to time I stand accused of injecting humor into my public presentations on health policy in the United States. As a German-born economist, I find it hurtful. Germans pride themselves on their lack of humor. Economists, for their part, pride themselves on being practitioners of the dismal science. We are the professional buzzkills who put caveats on any good news. Now imagine both traits packaged into one human being: you have yours truly. It is not that I inject humor into our otherwise august debate on health policy. Rather, the health system in the United States is in many ways so risible that it comes across as droll even when a dour German-born economist describes it.
Many executives have long enjoyed perks such as free health care and better health benefits for themselves and their families. But under a little noticed anti-discrimination provision in the federal health law, such advantages could soon trigger fines of up to $500,000. Employers "should be more concerned about this than anything else" in the law, because many are in violation, and the penalties can be stiff, said Jay Starkman, chief executive of Engage PEO in St. Petersburg, Fla., which offers human resources services and advises clients on the health law.
Our hospital bill is about to get a thorough examination. Acting on the suggestion of her top data crunchers at the department's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released an enormous data file on May 8 that reveals the list—or "chargemaster"—prices of all hospitals across the country for the 100 most common inpatient treatment services in 2011. It then compares those prices with what Medicare actually paid hospitals for the same treatments—which was typically a fraction of the chargemaster prices.