Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid announced that he will include a government-backed insurance plan in the chamber's healthcare reform legislation. Reid's decision was a reversal from two weeks ago, when he appeared inclined to set aside the idea in an attempt to avoid alienating party moderates. Doubts remain about whether he has the votes to guarantee passage, but he said he concluded that adding a public option was the best way of bringing the strongest possible bill to the Senate floor in November.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, sided with his party's liberals and announced that he would include a government-run insurance plan in healthcare legislation that he plans to take to the Senate floor within a few weeks. Under the proposal, however, a state could refuse to participate in the public insurance plan by adopting a law to opt out.
In letters sent to 10 health IT companies, Sen. Chuck Grassley says that he has "received complaints" about systems that allow doctors to enter medical orders by computer. Grassley asks the companies to send him copies of "complaints and/or concerns" that healthcare providers have expressed about the systems. He also wants to know whether the companies typically include legal provisions in their contracts that "shift responsibility for errors in the . . . systems to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare providers." The federal stimulus bill provides billions of dollars in federal incentives to encourage doctors and hospitals to start using these sorts of systems, the Wall Street Journal Health Blog notes.
Remote monitoring is offering a high-tech solution to the growing problem of how to care for the sickest patients amid a worsening shortage of intensivists, the critical-care specialists trained in caring for life-threatening injuries or illnesses. Studies show that mortality rates are 30% to 40% lower in hospitals where intensivists are providing round-the-clock care to prevent complications and minimize errors, but only about a third of patients in the ICU today receive care from an intensivist.
A new study suggests there are already fewer doctors practicing than had been estimated because of a lag in reporting retirements. The new study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that the United States has 788,000 active doctors—65,000 fewer than calculations have suggested. The doctor work force is also younger than previously estimated, with a greater proportion of doctors in their 20s and 30s and fewer who are 65 and older. By 2020, there will be 957,000 physicians, the new estimates show, rather than the 1.05 million previously projected.
While there has been a huge push for U.S. healthcare providers to go digital, the effectiveness of health information technology products is questionable, critics say. Washington Post interviews with more than two dozen doctors, academics, patients, and computer programmers suggest that computer systems can increase errors, add hours to doctors' workloads, and compromise patient care. "Health IT can be beneficial, but many current systems are clunky, counterintuitive and in some cases dangerous," Ross Koppel, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who published a key study on electronic medical records in 2005, told the Post.