Medicare is wasting more than $8 billion on an experimental program that rewards providers of mediocre health care and is unlikely to produce useful results, federal investigators say in a new report. The report, to be issued Monday by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, urges the Obama administration to cancel the program, which pays bonuses to health insurance companies caring for millions of Medicare beneficiaries. Administration officials, however, defended the project and said they would not cancel it because it could improve the quality of care for older Americans.
At the headquarters of Cerner, the world’s largest stand-alone maker of health IT systems, the blood-and-guts realities of medicine meet the sterile speed and exactitude of the computer revolution. For 33 years founder and Chief Executive Neal Patterson has preached better health through information, a world in which powerful digital machines right out of Star Trek link hospital bedsides with real-time data on what ails the entire nation, finding patterns, suggesting treatments—and tracking costs. Patterson, 62, has likened the journey to pushing a "500-pound marshmallow up a hill" but now insists that healthcare's moment of digital transformation has arrived.
Dialogue With Life, a documentary from the late fifties or early sixties sponsored by the Medical Society of the State of New York, looks at advances in medical technology and the corresponding rise in health insurance in the mid-20th century. This excerpt, courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, looks back at medicine 1931—a time when hardly anyone had health insurance and diseases like pneumonia were deadly. The narrator gives an overview of how much healthcare cost at the time, and the numbers are fascinating.
Fighting the fake drug menace is like playing whack-a-mole. It is technically illegal for individuals to order drugs online from other countries. And yet no sooner does the F.D.A. shut down one dubious online pharmacy than another pops up. According to the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, only 3 percent of the 9,600 online pharmacies it has reviewed complied with industry standards. Many were based overseas, so their sales to Americans were illegal; others did not require doctors' prescriptions. And some were very likely peddling dangerous counterfeit drugs.
Larry Kaiser, at the helm of Temple University Health System in North Philadelphia for a year, is crafting a bold plan to steer the organization out of the financial morass of being Philadelphia's unofficial public hospital for the poor. So far, he has engineered the $83.8 million purchase of the Fox Chase Cancer Center and overseen the opening of an outpatient facility in Oaks that is drawing suburban patients with better-paying insurance and has treated 40 percent more patients than budgeted. Kaiser has also recruited more than a dozen high-profile physicians to Temple University Hospital, with a focus on innovative surgeons expected to fill the operating rooms with patients from outside Temple health's core North Philadelphia market.
At stake is the long-term health care available to Salinas residents and what entity will provide it. Will Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System: continue as is, partner with Natividad Medical Center, or sell outright to Healthcare Corporation of America? After an arduous year-long process, the SVMH board of directors decided in March to proceed to what is called Stage 2—a fact-finding exercise in which the suitors and hospital dig deeper into each other's backgrounds and books to see what might work.