The Pennsylvania House has approved a bill that would extend health insurance coverage to dependent children up to the age of 30. The legislation, which passed the Senate unanimously in March, would allow adult children to be covered under their parents' insurance plan.
A leading healthcare advocate in the New Jersey Senate said that he would not vote to approve a budget that tightens access to the state's FamilyCare program, and suggested several possible funding sources.
Last year, New Jersey expanded FamilyCare, the state program that offers free or low-cost health insurance to children in lower-income families, to include more parents. But faced with a dire fiscal situation, Gov. Jon Corzine has proposed restricting new adult enrollment in FamilyCare in the fiscal year that begins July 1 to save $9.7 million.
Urgent-care centers have been gaining ground across the country recently as an attractive medical option for time-pressed families trying to avoid spending hours in a hospital ER or days waiting for a doctor's appointment. The centers offer walk-in medical services and extended hours to customers with non-life-threatening medical problems. Doctors provide the care, assisted by nurses, and generally X-ray and laboratory services are available. Most centers are open 365 days a year, and insurance policies cover most services. This convenience-oriented format is getting a boost as hospitals and private firms build new centers, responding in part to new competition from retail clinics.
The swine-flu outbreak has focused a spotlight on a shortage of technicians to run critical lab tests. Like the growing shortages of primary-care doctors and nurses, the shrinking ranks of skilled lab workers pose a potential threat to the safety and quality of health care, medical experts warn. Hospitals say it currently can take as much as a year to fill some job openings, and the American Society for Clinical Pathology says average job-vacancy rates currently top 50% in some states.
The Obama administration's health technology plan includes incentive payments for adopting electronic health records: more than $40,000 per physician and up to several million dollars for hospitals. The payments are based on "meaningful use" of such records, and how the government defines and measures meaningful use will determine whether the $19 billion in incentives is a significant step in reforming American healthcare or a high-tech fiasco, according to this blog posting from the New York Times.
Legislators had sharp questions for Virginia officials about how hackers stole millions of personal pharmaceutical records from a prescription drug database that was supposed to be secure. The pointed questions came at a House Appropriations Committee meeting almost two weeks after hackers claimed to have taken 8 million patient records and 35 million prescriptions collected by the Prescription Monitoring Program. Pat Paquette, technology director for the Virginia Department of Health Professions, defended the agency and its security measures.