Consumers should brace themselves for increasing costs of yet another key component of most families’ budgets: the price of health insurance premiums. Even if Congress can’t get its act together to extend coronavirus pandemic-related subsidies for millions of Americans covered under Obamacare, insurers in individual marketplaces across 13 states and Washington, D.C., are looking to….
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As medical costs, especially for cancer, slam patients, where’s Congress?
While Congress seems paralyzed or, at best, willing to shrink significantly its efforts to help Americans deal with the punishing costs of care in the U.S. medical system, could federal lawmakers be confronted at the same time with more compelling evidence about the need for aggressive, not timid, action? Do beleaguered constituents need to barrage….
Continue ReadingAs road toll soars, experts see vehicles as ‘candy stores’ of distraction
Anyone who has so much as contemplated buying a vehicle in recent times will quickly catch on to what experts fear may be a root cause of the nation’s spiking road toll: Step back and consider just how much importance manufacturers — and consumers — pay to those rolling infotainment systems. Their screens have grown….
Continue ReadingPopular, costly knee injections little better than placebo, big study finds
Since the 1970s, some doctors have treated arthritic knees by injecting them with hyaluronic acid, a substance originally derived from the combs of roosters. Specialists have zealously promoted this therapy, costing patients a few hundred dollars a pop and repeated so widely that Medicare alone pays $300 million annually for it. Doctors argue it reduces….
Continue ReadingU.S. nears next health insurance cliff with affordability crisis growing
Even as Congress lumbers into creating the next crisis for millions of Americans and whether they can access and afford health insurance, the giant, built-in flaws in the current coverage system keep sending far too many patients and their loved ones into a financial morass with which politicians and policymakers refuse to reckon. Successive Democratic….
Continue ReadingA posthumous diagnosis forces soccer to reconsider risk of head harms
In 2015, public attention galvanized around the significant risks of head trauma and the sport of football with the disclosure that Andre Waters, 44, a hard-hitting, onetime Philadelphia Eagles player, had been diagnosed after his suicide with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Has soccer — one of the most popular pastimes on the planet and….
Continue ReadingHealth insurers start to join hospitals in giant disclosure of data on prices
If patients can benefit from price transparency by hospitals, shouldn’t employers and health insurers post online what they are paying for medical services? Yes, say federal regulators, who started requiring this effective July 1. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has ordered parties that act as health payers to make public a wealth….
Continue ReadingSenators kill big plan to modernize VA care but offer no alternatives
One of the nation’s largest health care systems had its ambitious plans to reshape itself for the 21st century torpedoed by a dozen members of the U.S. Senate, with taxpayers and veterans left in the lurch with great uncertainty about the future medical care for those who valiantly have served this country. Just a few….
Continue ReadingFDA bans Juul vaping products and seeks to slash nicotine in cigarettes
Federal regulators have cracked down on Big Tobacco and its zealous, profit-seeking promotion of products that fuel some of the leading causes of preventable disease in this country: cigarette smoking and vaping. The federal Food and Drug Administration ordered the maker of Juul, a pioneer in pushing so-called e-cigarettes and vape flavorings on the young,….
Continue ReadingFinancial punishment is now a built-in aspect of U.S. health care system
The sky-high and relentlessly rising cost of U.S. health care is slamming patients, ensnaring them in pricey over-testing, over-diagnosing, and over-treatment. It is pounding them with pervasive, pernicious, and unacceptable medical debt. The crushing burden of expensive health care is leaving consumers going without as they also struggle now with soaring prices for gas, food, and….
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