Consumers on Wednesday will finally get some answers about one of modern life's most persistent mysteries: how much medical care actually costs. For the first time, the federal government will release the prices that hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures. Until now, these charges have been closely held by facilities that see a competitive advantage in shielding their fees from competitors. What the numbers reveal is a health-care system with tremendous, seemingly random variation in the costs of services.
For the first time, the federal government has disclosed what hospitals charge for the 100 most common Medicare DRGs. The findings, revealed Wednesday, show not only massive disparities between hospitals in states nationwide, but even larger gaps between individual communities all around the country. Examples of the different types of bills include use of a ventilator for breathing difficulties, treatment for pneumonia and the cost of a joint replacement. Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff discusses these findings in this video.
State health officials don't know how often Marylanders use medications mixed in facilities lacking safety oversight, like a Massachusetts facility linked to three deaths here, but a newly passed law could tell them — and help demonstrate a gap in federal regulation. Batches of sterile drugs from so-called compounding pharmacies will be subject to state review under the measure Gov. Martin O'Malley signed this month. And pharmacists and doctors who perform compounding, in which drugs are somehow altered from their Food and Drug Administration-approved form, will face an extra layer of permits and inspections for drugs used in Maryland. But "it's not realistic for Maryland to set up national oversight," said Joshua M. Sharfstein, the state health secretary.
In trying to explain why the debate over expanding Ohio's Medicaid has stalled, the Cleveland Clinic's David Bronson said Wednesday morning that "A lot of good people are struggling to figure out how to do the right thing." Bronson, who is president of the Clinic's regional hospitals, is one of many hospital voices ratcheting up their lobbying in recent weeks. He joined a conference call Wednesday morning with other advocates to once again push for a Medicaid expansion. It was the second such advocacy call organized this week and a sign that -- as one lobbyist explained -- time is ticking.
A years-long effort to establish a medical school at the University of Texas is about to reach a major milestone. A committee of the UT System Board of Regents is scheduled to review the university's $334.5 million proposal Wednesday, and the full board is expected to sign off Thursday. The plan calls for issuing bonds to build and equip an academic building, a research building, a medical office building and a parking garage at the southern edge of campus. Officials hope to open the school's doors to 50 entering medical students in fall 2016; a previous goal of fall 2015 has been deemed overly optimistic.
In a test of services geared toward making sure patients took their prescribed medications after leaving the emergency room, none made a difference, a large new study suggests. Based on the experiment involving nearly 4,000 ER patients, researchers found that information packets, personal assistance and even access to an on-call medical librarian to answer questions about the drugs did not lead patients to fill more prescriptions or to take them as directed when they left the hospital. There is a great deal of evidence that patients who don't follow medication regimens have worse health outcomes and end up spending more for healthcare in the long run, according to the study's lead author Dr. Melissa McCarthy.