The Massachusetts Association of Health Plans proposed a wide-ranging set of recommendations intended to help control rising premiums and provide consumers with more information about why rates go up. The package includes ideas that seem intended to place the blame for rising healthcare costs on doctors and hospitals.
A new survey shows that when it comes to dealing with colleagues' mistakes or incompetence, physicians oftentimes abandon the high standards they espouse. According to the study, 45 percent of those surveyed they did not always report an incompetent or impaired colleague to the appropriate authorities, even though 96 percent said doctors should turn in such people.
A judge's instructions to a jury in a federal corruption case were too broad and allowed two former hospital executives to be convicted of conduct that was not illegal, according to an argument in appeals court. Robert Urciuoli, former president and chief executive of Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, RI, was convicted last year, along with the former vice president, of paying a state senator to advance the hospital's agenda at the Statehouse.
Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said he would focus on making insurance more affordable rather than requiring universal coverage as some Democrats have proposed.
Sabatino Bianco, MD, director of the Trinity Mother Frances Neuroscience Institute in Tyler, TX, recently began performing an innovative procedure, the endoscopic transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, or ETH. The latest example of minimally invasive surgery, the procedure allows the removal of pituitary tumors through the nasal cavity. In this podcast, Bianco discusses ETH and the technology involved.
In our November issue you will find a profile I prepared on Donald Hopkins, MD. Hopkins' work overseas eradicating the guinea worm disease takes place in impoverished areas where the technology we take for granted doesn't exist. The tools at his disposal are primitive ones, including screens used to filter water. That's one of the first steps toward eliminating the horrific disease.
Hopkins himself seems a bit uncomfortable in the modern age of technology. He has e-mail, but relies on an assistant to answer it for him. And he has little use for cell phones. Spam is part of the problem. Hopkins keeps a fax machine in his office and commented to me how many "junk faxes" he gets. It is a truism of information technology that it opens the floodgates to unwanted information. But there's more to it than that, he pointed out.
I asked Hopkins what it was like to have worked in such adverse conditions, then return to the United States, where affluence is widespread. He's clearly disturbed by the contrast, and commented about the tremendous amount of waste here. People routinely discard "old" clothes that might be the beginning of a brand new wardrobe in the third world. And we are served huge portions in restaurants when halfway around the globe, youngsters scrape by meal to meal.
Hopkins criticized our media for its celebrity "obsession," and for turning a deaf ear on international health issues that could be tackled if more resources were poured into the effort. Although he didn't say it, he was describing a society wallowing in its own fortunes, oblivious to those less fortunate around us.
No wonder Hopkins looks askance at modern information technology. It's not the technology so much as it is the information. "What makes the nightly news are stories that are photogenic, rather than things that are important for people to understand," he told me.
That underscores the mission of magazines like HealthLeaders. No matter how far off my technology beat I may wander, I will never have to write about Paris Hilton.
More than 40 million people in the United States say they cannot afford adequate heathcare and go without drugs, eyeglasses or dental treatment, according to the annual report on the nation's health by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
If they want to avoid a pay cut from Medicare next year, the nation's medical doctors should have to adopt electronic record-keeping, the Bush administration has announced.
In an effort to motivate workers to kick unhealthy habits, employees at some companies who are overweight, smoke, or have high cholesterol, and who don't participate in supplementary wellness programs, will pay more for health insurance.
Supporters of a bill that would require hospitals to dispense emergency contraception for sexual assault victims said they have enough votes to adopt the bill in the Assembly this month. But they are still facing a challenge from those who oppose the measure and say hospitals shouldn't be forced into such a mandate.
