In the last decade, there's been a tenfold increase in the number of charity clinics in the Dallas area identified by an association formed by the Dallas County Medical Society. The clinics, now numbering more than 40, are among the only option for growing numbers of people without health insurance, especially illegal immigrants who are fearful to use government-affiliated clinics or hospitals. The growth in charity clinics "really shows the alarming situation in our community of the uninsured growing," said Connie Webster, community health director for the Dallas County Medical Society.
Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell's office says the state has fielded more than 7,000 phone calls from the public inquiring about the new Charter Oak Health Plan, which is for uninsured adults who are too old for the state's HUSKY healthcare plan for children and too young for Medicare. Charter Oak was launched on June 30, and its Web site is averaging 1,800 hits a day. The state has received 1,950 applications since July 1, and Rell's office estimates that 15,000 to 17,000 people will be enrolled in Charter Oak by the end of this fiscal year.
The Food and Drug Administration is warning doctors and patients that electronic devices such as pacemakers, cardiac defibrillators and insulin pumps can malfunction when people get CT scans. The scans can cause medical devices to shock patients or start sending inaccurate signals, the FDA said in a public health alert. The agency has received six confirmed reports of devices that malfunctioned after a CT scan and another nine reports of suspected problems, according to the FDA. No deaths occurred.
More than two-thirds of Massachusetts residents support the state's two-year-old, near-universal health insurance law, according to a new poll. The survey by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation found that 69% of those polled backed the law, an increase from the 61% who said they favored it when it was first adopted. Yet when pollsters asked the same question of residents who have bought health insurance or changed policies because of the law, support dropped to 52%.
Three experimental drugs have doctors hopeful that millions of people at risk of lethal blood clots may soon get easier treatment. The drug research comes as Medicare is considering withholding payment from hospitals when at-risk patients develop clots in their veins, a common preventable cause of hospital deaths. The National Quality Forum has estimated that only about a third of patients who need protective blood thinners while hospitalized get them.
Only half of U.S. men and women older than 50 are getting screened for colorectal cancer, according to a report. However, the current rate of screening is an improvement from the 43% who received the tests in 2000, the researchers noted. Insurance coverage may be part of the problem: Only 24% of people lacking health insurance had colorectal cancer screening compared with more than 50% of insured Americans.
On Nov. 27, one patient had a wound infection in her groin after an operation at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, CA. Another patient, who was in the hospital because of a blocked bowel, had a drug-resistant form of staphylococcus bacteria detected in his urine. But the hospital employee assigned to track and prevent the spread of infections and communicable diseases was unaware that the two patients were in the hospital, and an inspection the next day revealed other problems, according to state regulators. Citing such problems, the state inspectors said the hospital had "serious deficiencies," and federal officials said it did not meet Medicare's standards for infection control.
Despite Congress blocking a cut in Medicare payments to doctors, it has done nothing to solve the fundamental problem that caused the cut. The issue will now come back to haunt the next president and the next Congress, lawmakers and health policy experts say. Democrats and Republicans agree that the formula for paying doctors is broken, but say fixing it would be expensive. Lawmakers are pleading with physicians' groups to come forward with a comprehensive proposal, but that could be difficult because any new formula would almost surely produce winners and losers among doctors.
Doctors complain of shrinking payments from health insurers, pointing to insurance companies' huge profits and high CEO salaries. In response, insurers say doctors provide uneven care, overtreat patients, and push up costs for everyone. The decades-old confrontation has gotten more heated recently, as insurers squeeze doctors' payments as one way to bring down soaring healthcare costs.
Auditors have recovered nearly $700 million in Medicare overpayments to hospitals and other medical providers in a half-dozen states under a program that pays the auditing firms a portion of amounts they identify. Healthcare providers and hospitals have called it overly aggressive and too confrontational, but CMS has supported the move and is in the process of expanding it nationally. In all, the agency's recovery audit contractor program caught $1.03 billion of improper payments over about three years, about $992.7 million of which was overpayments by Medicare.
