The millions of seniors who buy Medicare supplements may be charged wildly different amounts — even when they're the same age, living in the same city, and getting precisely the same benefits, Weiss Ratings reports. The reason: The commercial insurers that offer the supplements are allowed by state regulators to charge based on their expenses and costs of present patients. One example: A 79-year-old woman in Aventura choosing Plan F — a comprehensive plan covering almost all out-of pocket Medicare costs — could pay anywhere from $3,654 a year to $5,419 for exactly the same protection, according to Gavin Magor, an analyst with Jupiter-based Weiss Ratings, an independent rating agency of financial institutions. About 10 million seniors choose to sign up annually for these supplements, according to America's Health Insurance Plans. That process began Saturday, with the start of Medicare's annual open enrollment.
Fewer people in the U.S. report having angina or a heart attack, though the South continues to be a hot spot for heart troubles. So says the CDC in its latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The percentage of adults surveyed who report being told by a health professional that they have coronary heart disease — which happens when the blood vessels to the heart narrow, causing chest pain or heart attack — fell to 6% last year from 6.7% in 2006. There's been a concerted public-health effort over the past two decades to better prevent and treat heart disease. Fewer people are smoking, and hypertension and high cholesterol are better controlled. As the WSJ's Ron Winslow has reported, the payoff has included a sharp drop in the heart-attack rate among older Americans. But cardiovascular disease is still the leading cause of death in the U.S. — according to the CDC, it kills more people than cancer, lower respiratory diseases and accidents combined. And according to the new stats, prevalence of CHD varies by age, gender and ethnicity.
Even in the vast world of apps, Dr. Patrick J. Gagnon has one with an unusual distinction: it had to be cleared for use by the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Gagnon, a radiation oncologist, uses the app when he sees patients in his Fairhaven, MA, office. He pulls his iPhone out of his pocket, and then he and a patient, side by side, can view images on it and discuss treatment. "It's a nice way to go through a scan with a patient," he said. The app he uses, called Mobile MIM, made by MIM Software, can turn an iPhone or an iPad into a diagnostic medical instrument. It allows physicians to examine scans and to make diagnoses based on magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography and other technologies if they are away from their workstations. Dr. Gagnon says the app will also prove useful when he wants to give physicians at other hospitals rapid access to images for immediate decisions.
Here is the dirty little secret of healthcare in America for the elderly, the one group we all assume has universal coverage thanks to the 1965 Medicare law: what Medicare paid for then is no longer what recipients need or want today. No one then envisioned the stunning advances in medicine that now keep people alive into advanced old age, often with unintended and unwelcome consequences. Indeed, scientific reports have showed the dangers, not merely the pointlessness and expense, of much of the care Medicare is providing. Of course, some may actually want everything medical science has to offer. But overwhelmingly, I've concluded in a decade of studying America's elderly, it is fee-for-service doctors and Big Pharma who stand to gain the most, and adult children, with too much emotion and too little information, driving those decisions.
MetroHealth System executives are facing a public inquisition. As the new Cuyahoga County Council begins its first two-year budget process, there were signs late last week that the county-owned health system's top leaders will not walk away with a proposed $72 million taxpayer subsidy without some pain. The recent announcements that MetroHealth would cut 450 jobs and close a 144-bed skilled-nursing unit to shave $30 million from its annual budget have put a spotlight on lingering questions about how the health system operates. "They are going to have to adjust to the idea of not going to one county commissioner and whispering in his ear about what they're doing," said Dan Brady, chairman of the county's health, human services and aging committee, which held a public hearing on MetroHealth on Thursday.
Medical centers nationwide have been resorting to alternate routes as traditional providers and quantities of medicine have dried up. During the summer, just more than half of the 549 U.S. hospitals responding to a survey by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a patient safety group, said they had purchased one or more prescription drugs from so-called "gray market vendors"- companies other than their normal wholesalers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports it is tackling the issue. "The FDA will continue its efforts to work with manufacturers to ameliorate shortages. For example, FDA already expedites requests to qualify new manufacturing sites, new production lines or new raw material suppliers to avert drug shortages," said FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Assistant Secretary for Health Howard Koh.