The legislation the Senate Finance Committee is expected to approve calls for the biggest expansion of Medicaid since its creation in 1965. Under the Senate bill and a similar House proposal, a patchwork state-federal insurance program targeted mainly at children, pregnant women, and disabled people would effectively become a Medicare for the poor, a healthcare safety net for all people with an annual income below $14,404, reports the Washington Post. Whether Medicaid can absorb a huge influx of beneficiaries is a matter of concern to many governors, who have cut low-income health benefits to cope with the economic downturn.
Any healthcare overhaul that Congress and President Obama enact is likely to have as its centerpiece a mandate that insurers would not be allowed to reject individuals or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history. But simply banning medical discrimination would not necessarily remove it from the equation, economists and healthcare analysts say.
As jobs continued to disappear around the country in September, the number of healthcare jobs kept growing. There were about 19,000 new healthcare jobs were added during the month, bringing the total to 13.67 million, according to the seasonally adjusted estimate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the past year, the sector has added about 300,000 jobs. During the same period, the total number of nonfarm jobs nationwide fell by about 6 million, to 131 million.
Despite months of outward ambivalence about creating a government health insurance plan, the Obama White House has launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to get divided Senate Democrats to take up some version of the idea for a final vote in the coming weeks. President Obama has cited a preference for the public option, but after facing criticism he expressed openness to health cooperatives and other ways to offer consumers potentially more affordable alternatives to private health plans.
A new urgent care and walk-in center in Miami Shores, FL, promises to offer faster, more affordable care than emergency room visits. The recently opened center provides routine clinical and diagnostic services, and patients needing serious medical attention can be monitored with machines like EKGs until they can be transferred to a hospital.
Over the last two years, three-quarters of San Francisco's uninsured adults have enrolled in a public program that guarantees access to medical services, an effort that is being touted as a national model during the debate over healthcare reform. More than 46,000 adults have enrolled in Healthy San Francisco since it was launched, and the first-in-the- nation, city-run universal healthcare effort has received high marks in recent independent studies.
Massachusetts healthcare executives are lobbying legislators to move cautiously before embracing a proposal to transform the way hospitals and doctors are paid. Three months after a state commission proposed the plan to control exploding healthcare costs within five years, many hospital executives and doctors call it unrealistic, and say it could bankrupt some providers and compromise patient care if implemented too quickly and without major changes.
Physician's personal information, including Social Security numbers, may have been compromised after a laptop containing the data was stolen in August from an employee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association's national headquarters in Chicago. The breach involves "tens of thousands" of physicians nationwide, although the precise number is unclear, according to a national Blue Cross-Blue Shield spokesman. Thirty-nine affiliates feed information about providers into a database maintained by the association's national headquarters.
The U.S. government is expecting delivery starting this week of enough doses of the new swine-flu vaccine for nearly every American who wants it, but state and local budget cuts coupled with limits on who can administer the vaccine could slow the campaign. A second wave of the H1N1 virus is widespread across more than half of U.S. states, but it will be weeks before millions of people who want shots can get them. Manufacturers are still producing the 250 million doses the government has ordered, and state health officials must then determine where to distribute them.
India will play a significant role in reducing healthcare costs in the United States as India's healthcare market expands, General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey R. Immelt predicts. The Indian healthcare industry is "on the verge of substantial growth," Immelt said, adding that healthcare products and services developed cheaply in the United States will be exported to Western markets, cutting prices there.
