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Advocates say e-prescribing is a key advance toward health care's digital future because of its potential to reduce medical errors, cut drug costs and save doctors and patients time and money. But kinks need to be worked out to spur more rapid acceptance.
Earlier this month, lobbyists trooped in to watch as the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions began working on a health-care overhaul - the first congressional panel this year to move so far.
As President Obama tries to sell the middle class on health reform, Congress is considering proposals that would affect how individuals benefit. Lower-income people would benefit most in the near term from insurance subsidies. But Obama is emphasizing measures he says would help the middle class by reining in the rising cost of health care and insurance over the long term.
President Obama has repeatedly promised that providing every American affordable access to quality health care won't cost more money than we'll save through reform, but he's recently raised the stakes even further. Health care reform, he has said, would "foster economic growth" and "unleash America's economic potential."
Partisan health reform fights have focused on a handful of concerns: the proposed public health insurance plan, individual and employer mandates, financing measures to subsidize low-income Americans and to cover the uninsured. As a combatant in some of these fights, I'm not one to say the partisan conflict is misplaced.
The over-65 crowd, with its outsized political clout, will have a big say in the fate of any health overhaul. And that helps explain a recent agreement on drug discounts involving the pharmaceutical industry, the White House and Congress.
In an afternoon news conference, President Barack Obama pushed hard for a government-run public insurance plan, but indicated it's not a make-or-break requirement for health overhaul legislation. These video excerpts are courtesy of C-SPAN.
Democrats in Congress, surprised by the high cost estimates for their health care proposals, are looking at a wide range of options for raising money and reducing costs. Some of the revenue raisers have been rejected in previous years, but now all ideas are on the table because of the big amounts needed to pay for a health care overhaul.
Kaiser Health News' Mary Agnes Carey discusses recent and upcoming activities on the Hill -- part of a weekly series of video reports.
Once a senior begins receiving long-term care services, she and her family often are in for two shocks. The first is that Medicare won't pay beyond perhaps a few months after a hospitalization. The second is that while Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor, may help, chances are it will only do so for nursing home residents.
Memphis, Tenn., is one of a growing number of areas with a successful high-tech health information exchange, which proponents say saves lives and money. But the system now faces a crucial test: what happens when the initial funding runs out?
The Democratic members of three House committees today released a plan they said would lower health care costs and improve health care choices. They plan includes individual as well as employer mandates to buy insurance and would provide for a government-run public plan alternative to private insurance.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee continues to plow through hundreds of amendments as it works on its health overhaul bill. Here's a short selection of amendments, which show a wide range of interests and concerns, and are pending unless otherwise marked.
"Ad Audit" is KFF Health News's new feature examining advertising campaigns designed to influence the health reform debate. In this campaign, called "What If?", Health Care for America Now, an advocacy group funded by unions and other organizations favoring major health care changes, pushes one of the most controversial elements of the Democratic-backed legislation: a new government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.
The Web site Politics Daily asked two experts to debate perhaps the hottest topic in health reform: Whether to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurance plans. The debaters on the so-called "public option" are Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now and James Gelfand, senior manager of health policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Everybody knew that a complete overhaul of the nation's health care system was going to be an expensive undertaking.
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