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People who are dying currently can’t get Medicare to pay for hospice care if they continue aggressive curative treatment. But the new health overhaul law could lead to a major change in olicy that allows both hospice and curative care.
Companies that provide health insurance to retirees who are too young for Medicare may get some financial relief due to a new $5 billion federal program.
Today, we begin a new Friday afternoon feature: a wrap-up of the week’s major health policy news coverage.
You might think the fight over mental health parity – the requirement that health insurance plans not handle coverage for mental ailments any differently than coverage for any other disorder – would be over. You would, however, be wrong.
Unless clarifications are made in the financial overhaul legislation currently pending in Congress, doctors and dentists — as well as other health practitioners — are concerned that they will face hefty costs and paperwork burdens.
Public health officials and a host of prevention and wellness groups have sharply different ideas about how to spend a big pot of new federal prevention money
Public health officials and a host of prevention and wellness groups have sharply different ideas about how to spend a big pot of new federal prevention money
For the third time this year, Congress has just days to avert a scheduled 21 percent cut in pay to doctors who treat seniors and others on the Medicare program. And no one seems to be able to figure out how to solve the problem in anything except a stopgap way.
A new commission created by the health law is supposed to ensure that in 2015, Medicare spending is supposed to be limited to a fixed growth rate.
Too many nonprofit hospitals fail to adequately publicize their charity-care programs, two advocacy groups say in a survey report released today.
A searing recession that left nearly 10 percent of the American workforce unemployed, plus a time when health care costs continue to soar, equals fertile ground for health insurance swindlers.
Medical homes – where primary care doctors are held responsible for coordinating care for individual patients
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday that “within a couple months we will have a very robust call center operation” to answer consumers’ questions about the new health overhaul law.
Specialists make a lot more than doctors who are generalists, so-called primary care doctors. But the size of the gap might surprise you: Try more than $100,000 a year.
Some states have told the Department of Health and Human Services that they intend to establish their own high-risk health insurance pool while others have said they want the federal government to do it.
At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, students get hands-on lessons about the impact of treatment costs on patients by volunteering Saturdays at the East Harlem Health Outreach Program, a student-run free clinic for uninsured residents of a low-income neighborhood nearby.
Doctors in training have traditionally been insulated from details about the cost of tests and treatments they prescribe. But concerns about rising health costs are slowly changing that.
Electronic medical records could help curb health costs by providing doctors with details on the price of tests and drugs, health policy experts say.
With an improving economy and help from the federal government, the worst of the fiscal bloodbath for state governments seems to be over. But the next couple of years still will be challenging and the long-run outlook for state budgets is shaping up to be even tougher.
Some states have told the Department of Health and Human Services that they intend to establish their own high-risk health insurance pool while others have said they want the federal government to do it.
