Twenty Democrats who are campaigning for president took to network television for four hours and two nights last week to put health care as a central issue of their campaigns. The format of this initial candidate “debate,” including hand-raised answers to complex issues, failed to allow the presidential aspirants to delve much into the details….
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Telemarketing “free” back and limb braces for seniors adds up to a $1.2 billion Medicare fraud
Federal authorities have busted up what they say is a $1.2 billion Medicare fraud that should give taxpayers and patients pause about long-distance medical consultations and the huge sums of cash washing around the medical device industry. Two dozen people, some of them doctors, have been charged in a complex ploy to gull seniors into….
Continue ReadingAs GOP keeps slashing at health coverage, big strains of caregiving ignored
Americans have real reason to fear a health care catastrophe: If loved ones suffer major injury or illness, who will feed, bathe, and care for them 24/7 after they get out of the hospital and recuperate at home? Who will take time off from work to set up and take them to unending and long….
Continue ReadingAmericans rely on health coverage from work. It’s not getting the job done.
Republicans got their heads handed to them in the midterms because they bungled a decade of efforts to eliminate public options on health insurance, the House minority leader has conceded. But he and other lawmakers, as well as corporate bosses, may face greater political fallout for failing to deal with a bigger health coverage nightmare for ….
Continue ReadingWhy are medical bills soaring? Blame a 42% hike in hospital prices.
Patients and reformers attacking skyrocketing health care costs may want to focus less on doctors and more on big, shiny hospitals, where in just five years prices soared by 42 percent for inpatient care versus the still sizable 18 percent price hikes that MDs scored. Those findings are part of a new study that examined….
Continue ReadingMedicare is fining nursing homes when patients are readmitted too soon to hospitals
Federal regulators have warned nursing homes nationwide to improve the quality and safety of their patient care or face consequences that operators may hasten to heed. That’s because new penalties and rewards will hit them in a place that counts — their pocketbooks. Two-thirds of the nation’s nursing homes will see a year’s worth of….
Continue ReadingHealth care advocacy group to expand ratings to include surgery centers
A familiar health care advocacy group will expand its grading of 2,000 or so hospitals across the country to also provide new safety and quality information on 5,600 stand-alone surgical centers that perform millions of procedures annually. It may seem like a small step, and the devil will be in the details of the new….
Continue ReadingAs partisans scuffle, Medicare surprises by reducing per-patient spending
Critics may want to carve it up and make it tougher to join, while proponents would expand it and add more money to it. But what could the U.S. health system overall learn from real, rigorous research on Medicare, the major health coverage method for tens of millions of Americans age 65 and older? Politico,….
Continue ReadingShift-and-shaft: Why is it always patients’ burden to hunt for affordable care?
The health policy wonks and those who purport to “reform” the U.S. health care system may be long on academic and other fancy credentials. But they also persist in demonstrating they can be short on old-fashioned common sense, especially about the way most of us lead our lives. That’s a point emphasized in a recent….
Continue ReadingIn health care, nursing homes not alone in confronting staffing problems
It’s unlikely to surprise anyone who has visited friends or loved ones at a nursing home that such facilities too often are woefully staffed. But why have federal regulators allowed themselves to be gulled about nursing home personnel levels, and how will not just these care-giving sites but also others, notably hospitals, deal with the….
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