Despite strong signals that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, the House and the Senate would support peeling back parts of a three-year-old ban on gifts from pharmaceutical companies to doctors ? a policy that critics say is strangling the restaurant business and killing jobs ? 2011 is coming to a close without action. But efforts to dismantle components of the ban are poised to reemerge in 2012 and received the fresh backing of a panel of lawmakers last week, potentially teeing up the issue for consideration during debate on a major health care system overhaul eyed for next year.
President Barack Obama's health overhaul encourages prevention by requiring most insurance plans to pay for preventive care. On the plus side, more than 22 million Medicare patients and many more Americans with private insurance have received one or more free covered preventive services this year. From cancer screenings to flu shots, many services no longer cost patients money. But there are confusing exceptions. Colonoscopies, for example, can go from free to pricey while the patient is under anesthesia.
When a star cardiologist at St. Joseph Medical Center was accused of performing hundreds of unnecessary medical procedures in 2009, it changed the course of the Towson hospital and now raises questions about its future. St. Joseph plans to narrow its search for a new "strategic partner" in coming weeks, but analysts say it may not offer enough new paying patients and other immediate financial benefits to outweigh the liabilities ? including hundreds of lawsuits and declining revenue.
More than a year after the healthcare reform law sought to prevent sick patients from losing medical coverage, insurers are still paying for their alleged abuses. Blue Shield has agreed to pay $2 million to resolve accusations that the company improperly dropped policyholders after they got sick and needed expensive treatment. The settlement, announced Wednesday by Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich, ends an investigation into more than 1,000 so-called rescissions by Blue Shield, a San Francisco-based not-for-profit company.
Three people received full-face transplants at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston this year. Now, physicians are reporting the details of the extensive procedures — which include grafting not only the skin, but also nerves, muscles, blood vessels, and structures like the nose. The report appears in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Beauty takes no holiday. December, particularly the latter half, is the busiest time of the year for many plastic surgeons, cosmetic dermatologists and doctors who perform weight-loss operations like gastric bypass. Some doctors say they do twice as many of these elective procedures per day in this period as during the rest of the year.