A Senate committee has scheduled a vote for Tuesday on President Barack Obama's nominee for health and human services secretary, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. The Senate Finance Committee will vote on sending Sebelius' nomination to the full Senate. Lawmakers want Sebelius in place quickly as they get to work on legislation overhauling the nation's costly healthcare system.
The widow of a judge who died of lung cancer last year can sue Blue Cross for refusing to tell him about his right to seek an experimental treatment that his doctor said was his only hope, a California appeals court has ruled. The decision is the first to allow policyholders to seek damages from claims administrators, who advise insurers on coverage for millions of Californians. Blue Cross is the main administrator for CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, which insures 1.6 million state and local government employees and retirees.
After a nationwide search, the Miami Public Health Trust voted unanimously Friday to pick a veteran hospital administrator, Eneida Roldan, as the new chief executive of the Jackson Health System. She will become the first woman and first Hispanic to lead the tax-supported system, which generates more than $1 billion in revenue from four hospitals, 10 primary care centers, and other facilities, as well as a half-penny sales tax. With growing numbers of uninsured and pressures to reduce reimbursement rates for the Medicaid program that serves the poor, Roldan acknowledges she will face severe challenges of running a public hospital during a recession.
A coalition of groups pushing for a sales-tax increase to pay for healthcare programs in Washington state showed signs of getting back on a campaign track, after appearing to falter earlier. House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, met with representatives from the Washington State Hospital Association and Service Employees International Union on April 18. "We have a group of organizations that are very concerned about these budget cuts and I think they'll be there to respond" to a proposal for a public referendum on a sales-tax increase, he said.
In a startling illustration of the life-or-death decisions involving low-paid workers thousands of miles away in today's globalized world, Americans' most personal details move 24 hours a day as U.S. healthcare providers outsource billions of lines of transcription work each year to offices across Asia in a bid to cut the massive cost of medical bureaucracy. From dictated summaries of routine checkups to complete recordings of conversations between surgeons and nurses in operating theaters, the foreign workers are transforming the digital audio files into the documents that tell Americans' medical histories.
The Colon Health Center of Delaware has been selling an alternative to one of medicine's most unloved procedures: the colonoscopy. Rather than insert several feet of tubing into patients' lower intestines, clinicians slide patients into a computed tomography imaging machine that can quickly scan the abdomen for signs of cancer. Today, however, this procedure is the subject of a heated debate in Washington pitting powerful sectors of the healthcare industry against a government desperate to contain healthcare spending. The fight over virtual colonoscopy has also become a prime example of how hard it can be to ensure that healthcare dollars are spent efficiently, a key goal of the Obama administration.
Five Iowa residents filed a class-action lawsuit against a South Dakota urology clinic that might have exposed patients to blood-borne infections such as hepatitis and HIV. The federal complaint was filed in Sioux Falls against Siouxland Urology Center in Dakota Dunes and its six owners. The South Dakota Department of Health put out a news release stating that a routine survey of the center identified the potential for infection during cystoscopy procedures because single-use products such as saline solution bags and tubing were used on more than one patient before being discarded.
In the debate about universal healthcare, ensuring that all people have insurance is equated with making sure all individuals will receive healthcare. Thats not necssarily the case, says New York doctor Marc Siegel in a opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. A growing number of physicians are dropping out of insurance plans, particularly the giant programs sponsored by the government. That means a patient may have coverage but still have trouble affording care, according to Siegel.
Shortly after Congress returns from recess April 20, lawmakers will have to choose which Obama promise to make a higher priority: overhauling the healthcare system or addressing climate change. A growing number of Democratic lawmakers prefer healthcare, saying that has a far greater chance of producing consensus than climate change, inside the party and across party lines. And they argue that it would be a more tangible accomplishment to present to financially stressed voters heading into the 2010 midterm elections.
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, serves a special adviser to President Obama's budget director, Peter R. Orszag. He is also the older brother of Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. For two decades, Emanuel has been writing about how to guarantee healthcare for all. In White House discussions on health policy, he emphasizes the need to slash co-payments for preventive care and insists that patients should be able to keep their doctors even if they change insurance plans. He also brings to the White House a physician's perspective, which was generally missing from the last big effort to overhaul healthcare in 1993-94.
