Medicare ranks first in voters' minds and considerably above President Obama's healthcare overhaul as Americans decide who they will support for president, according to a new poll. The Affordable Care Act came in fifth on a list of healthcare issues polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, with about six in 10 calling the divisive 2010 law important to their vote. Medicare received top billing, meanwhile, with 73 percent saying it is either "extremely" or "very" important as they make their choice for president. The finding comes as Medicare takes center stage in the race for the White House, eclipsing previous debates over the Affordable Care Act.
Ken Jacobs of the UC Berkeley Labor Center says creating a basic health plan could result in more Californians being covered overall. But he says the program could remove nearly a million people from the exchange. That could hinder its ability to control premium costs over time.Jacobs helped analyze the impact of the program for the California Health Benefit Exchange, which opposed the bill last year. Hernandez says the exchange would still have significant buying power without those in the plan. He also says the program would be almost entirely federally funded. An Assembly committee will make its assessment about the cost this Thursday.
A fired hospital technician has sued her former hospital and bosses for sex and religious discrimination, claiming one of them watched porn on in the operating room and called her a "dumb Jew bitch." Sandra Morris, 37, claims she was the victim of sexist and anti-Semitic taunts over the five years she worked at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. In a lawsuit filed July 31 in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Morris alleges her former immediate supervisor, cardiovascular perfusionist Ahmet Cercioglu, watched X-rated movies on his cell phone while operating equipment that keeps heart patients alive during bypass surgery.
The study "Nurses Working Outside of Nursing: Societal Trend or Workplace Crisis?" undertaken after a survey of registered nurses published in 2009 said more than 4 percent of 35,635 RNs from all 50 states and the District of Columbia did not work in the profession and more than 12 percent did not work at all. Nearly 45 percent of nurses who did not work were retired and more than 38 percent did not work because they had family obligations. More than 120,000 nurses now work outside the profession. They have become product developers, consultants, auditors, trainers, teachers, risk managers, authors, forensics specialists, publishers and a host of other things. Now nurses are entrepreneurs as well as healthcare professionals.
"Doctor Shortage Likely to Worsen With Health Law," read the alarming headline of a recent article in The New York Times. The article cites a study by the authoritative Association of American Medical Colleges, according to which by 2025 the nation’s demand for doctors active in patient care will be 916,000, while the projected supply is 785,400. These figures assume that the Affordable Care Act of 2010 will be implemented as intended. According to the Times article, the association has estimated that the extension of health-insurance coverage under the new law to slightly more than 30 million otherwise uninsured Americans will increase the doctor shortage by 30,000 for any future year, beginning in 2015.
WellPoint Inc. (WLP), the health insurer that's lost 18 percent of its market value over two months, is the least popular carrier among hospital executives who have to negotiate with the company, an industry survey shows. The second-biggest U.S. health plan was ranked last among the six largest for-profit insurers, undercut by low ratings for rejecting claims and fixing wrongly-denied bills. The poll of 403 executives was conducted by ReviveHealth, a communications company that works with hospitals. The showing for Indianapolis–based WellPoint was its worst in the survey's six years.