WASHINGTON -- President Obama on Friday highlighted a concentrated, localized strategy to encourage young Americans to enroll in the new health care exchanges. "Competition and choice are pushing down costs in the individual market, just like the law is designed to do," Obama said during remarks in San Jose, Calif. California is one of three states key to the 2010 health care law's expansion of health insurance to all Americans -- but especially young people. Republicans greeted Obama's remarks in California with an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News saying the health care plan will wind up hurting most Americans.
Elizabeth Rosenthal's eye-opening article about health care costs in The New York Times on Sunday was a reminder of how much more Americans pay for given procedures than citizens in health systems abroad. What was probably more surprising to most readers was the huge price differentials for identical procedures — not only across the United States, but even within American cities, where prices for a given procedure can vary tenfold. These price differentials, it should be noted, have never been shown to be related either to the cost of producing health care procedures or to their quality.
It was a nuisance and David Gassman put it off for three weeks, but he finally put a little stool sample into a tube and mailed it to a Kaiser Permanente lab. It's a good thing he did. The test indicated he had colon cancer. The 68-year-old Oakland resident, who is recovering from surgery, can thank an emerging field known as "comparative effectiveness research." It's an idea that sounds so obvious it's hard to believe it isn't already routine: Rather than simply analyzing whether a drug or treatment method works, researchers compare options to determine which ones do the best job for patients.
David Peabody is looking at the new federal health-care law with apprehension. Ericka Haverkos sees in it reason for hope. These two Columbus residents are emblematic of millions of Americans who next year will have to adapt to the most sweeping changes in the delivery of health care since the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid during the height of the Great Society in 1965. To Peabody, the new law will impose steep costs on his company and force him to decide whether to insure his 65 workers — a number that fluctuates with the season — or pay a fine to the federal government that would eat into a third of his $180,000 profit last year.
SACRAMENTO -- County officials and Gov. Jerry Brown's administration are inching toward a compromise on healthcare funding. The potential deal is the result of intense negotiations, including face-to-face meetings, phone calls and late-night text messages. "This is the biggest issue in the budget on healthcare," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, an advocacy group. The talks center on how much money will be shifted from counties to Sacramento, a key part of Brown's plan to finance the state's expansion of California's healthcare program for the poor.
State health department officials are putting together a "health benefit exchange" that in less than four months is to offer New Yorkers a marketplace to buy lower-cost health insurance as part of the federal Affordable Care Act. While officials are confident they will meet the Oct. 1 deadline for enrollment to get under way, advocates and others supportive of the state's efforts are anxious. "They are working long hours and there are a lot of complexities outside of their control," said Gwen O'Shea, president of the Health & Welfare Council of Long Island. "Some pieces of the ACA have clarity and some don't. I don't know how you take that complex framework and overlay it on to New York, which already has a broken system."