The Minnesota health insurance exchange cleared its final hurdle Monday and is on the way to the governor's desk to become law. State senators held a short, sharp debate on the legislation, which will create the online marketplace where more than a million Minnesotans could be shopping for health insurance by this time next year. Sen. Tony Lourey, DFL-Kerrick, who was the lead bill sponsor, called it "a health insurance exchange that will work for industry and at the end of the day has the backs of the people of Minnesota as well." It passed the Senate on a vote of 39-28, without a single Republican vote of support. It passed the House early Friday morning.
When visiting the doctor, there may be strength in numbers. In recent years, a growing number of doctors have begun holding group appointments -- seeing up to a dozen patients with similar medical concerns all at once. Advocates of the approach say such visits allow doctors to treat more patients, spend more time with them (even if not one-on-one), increase appointment availability and improve health outcomes. Some see group appointments as a way to ease looming physician shortages. According to a study published in December, meeting the country's health-care needs will require nearly 52,000 additional primary-care physicians by 2025. More than 8,000 of that total will be needed for the more than 27 million people newly insured under the Affordable Care Act.
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) -- A computer outage is preventing Boulder Community Hospital from accessing patient records, making it difficult for people to schedule surgeries and get test results for the past week. The outage affects the hospital, its Foothills campus, eight laboratories and six imaging centers. Meditech, the computer system used by the hospital to manage patient records, went down in the middle of last week. It could take the hospital until Friday to get the system back up. Hospital spokesman Rich Sheehan said computer experts are investigating what caused the outage, but the experts believe patient records are still protected and hospital officials don't believe they've been hacked.
Surfing the Web in his all-white Dumbo loft, Dr. Jay Parkinson, 37, looks like any other young tech visionary. He has a trim beard and thick-framed glasses. He wears slim-fitting black outfits and jaunty scarves. He speaks with a measured, "This American Life"-like cadence. And he's a firm believer in the utopian promise of the Internet. But Dr. Parkinson's start-up isn't a new app or social network. He is a founder of Sherpaa, a Web site that operates like a virtual doctor's office, examining patients by e-mail and text message.
Spending on prescription drugs nationwide has been slowing for years because of the increasingly widespread use of low-cost generics. But in 2012, something unheard-of happened: money spent on prescription drugs actually dropped. The dip was small -- 1 percent, to $325.7 billion -- but it was the first time the research firm IMS Health had recorded a decrease in United States drug sales since the company began tracking such numbers in 1957. And this month, the pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts reported that spending on commonly used pills -- like those that treat high blood pressure and cholesterol -- dropped by 1.5 percent, the first time that had happened since Express Scripts began following drug trends 20 years ago. But even as the United States is in the midst of what has been called a "golden" period in spending on drugs, some are warning that the ever-expanding use of generics has masked a growing problem for the government, insurers and others who pay the bill for prescription drugs: the rising cost of complex specialty medicines that treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases.
Steven Brill's exposé on hospital pricing in Time magazine predictably provoked from the American Hospital Association a statement seeking to correct the impression left by Mr. Brill that the United States hospital industry is hugely profitable. In this regard, the association can cite not only its own regularly published data, but also data from the independent and authoritative Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or Medpac, established by Congress to advise it on paying the providers of health care for treating Medicare patients. The hospital association also correctly points out that under the pervasive price discrimination that is the hallmark of American health care, the profit margin a hospital earns is the product of a complicated financial juggling act among its mix of payers.