WASHINGTON — Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed on Tuesday that she had made telephone calls to three companies regulated by her department and urged them to help a nonprofit group promote President Obama's health care law. She identified the companies as Johnson & Johnson, the drug maker; Ascension Health, a large Roman Catholic health care system; and Kaiser Permanente, the health insurance plan. At a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Ms. Sebelius said she did not explicitly ask the companies for money, but urged them to support the work of the nonprofit group, Enroll America.
Blue Shield of California owes $24.5 million in rebates to thousands of small-business customers, and rival Anthem Blue Cross will return $12 million to small firms under requirements of the federal healthcare law. The annual rebates were disclosed in reports to state regulators, and the final tally from some companies may change before they are paid out by Aug. 1. The rebate is required under the federal Affordable Care Act when insurers fail to spend a minimum of 80% of premiums on medical care for individual and small-business customers.
South Carolina this week could become the first state in the country to restrict the enactment of Obamacare since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that law last year. A proposed bill, on special order in the state Senate, would allow the state attorney general to take businesses, including health insurers, to court if he "has reasonable cause to believe" they are harming people by implementing the law. The bill already has passed the House. If it passes, the bill could push South Carolina to the forefront of Obamacare resistance, giving the state's Republican leaders a national stage.
Democratic Rep. Allyson Schwartz (Pa.) slammed House Republicans' plan to reform the Medicare physician payment system as too weak to ensure the program rewards quality instead of volume. Schwartz is behind an alternative, bipartisan package for repealing the flawed sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula, which necessitates an annual "doc fix" to protect doctors from an automatic pay cut of nearly 30 percent. Both Schwartz and Republican leaders have said their plans push Medicare away from its current "fee-for-service" system. But, contrasting the GOP plan with hers, Schwartz noted that the Republican bill maintains "fee-for-service" up front while incentivizing doctors to transition to new payment models.
Boston Children's Hospital has been pilot-testing an iPad app this spring called MyPassport. It's designed to give patients and their families more information about what's going on during their stay, from the doctors and nurses assigned to them to the results of their lab tests. It also lets them submit questions they have, and get them answered quickly by their docs. Hiep Nguyen, right, a urologist at the hospital, led the development of the app, relying on software development resources from the Fasttrack Innovation in Technology team at Children's.
Nurses, dentists and psychologists asked the Illinois Legislature this spring for more authority to make medical decisions with demand expected to surge under the federal health care law, but each time lawmakers sided with doctors and turned them down. It was a resounding victory in Springfield for the Illinois State Medical Society, which has represented doctors in a longstanding turf battle over how to address a growing shortage of medical services in rural and low-income urban neighborhoods across the state. Nurses and other medical providers argued they could help ease the burden if given more control, but in lobbying hard to defeat or gut those proposals the doctor's group argued they lacked proper qualifications.