70 percent of physicians spend more than one day per week on paperwork; up from 58 percent in 2013.
Colorado: 1 in 4 Obamacare enrollees plan to drop out.
Hospital elevator buttons carry more bacteria than toilet seats.
Teen suicide attempts rise as warning cuts medicine use.
The same people who fumbled Obamacare have custody of the flood of illegal immigrant children.
Yesterday, we noted the New York Times‘ analysis of hospital charges from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) latest data dump. The same data dump showed how the amounts Medicare paid to hospitals and other providers for different services. The Hill‘s Ferdous Al-Faruque has pointed out some extreme differences:
The agency found wide discrepancies in how much services cost in different regions of the nation and within the same geographic area. In 2012 a major joint replacement surgery cost Medicare $15,901 in Baltimore while the same procedure cost $239,138 in Los Angeles, the report says.
This variation appears too extreme. If it is a quality difference, surely the lower-quality provider is so bad that it should not be accepting patients! The seeming arbitrariness of Medicare payments might be one good explanation for the variance in costs observed by the Dartmouth Health Atlas team.
Like the physician data dump, for which we praised CMS, this is a treasure trove of data. CMS has also presented the data in a reasonably user-friendly way. It took me less than ten minutes to figure out the dashboard, which allows users to make charts and tables of almost any shape and size.
Well done, CMS. Keep ’em coming.
Charges for some of the most common inpatient procedures surged at hospitals across the country in 2012 from a year earlier, some at
more than four times the national rate of inflation, according to data released by Medicare officials on Monday.
Charges for chest pain, for instance, rose 10 percent to an average of $18,505 in 2012, from $16,815 in 2011. Average hospital charges for digestive disorders climbed 8.5 percent to nearly $22,000, from $20,278 in 2011.
In 2012, hospitals charged more for every one of 98 common ailments that could be compared to the previous year. For all but seven, the increase in charges exceeded the nation’s 2 percent inflation rate for that year, according to The Times’s analysis. (NYT)
The post-2008 recession is associated with increasing obesity in rich nations.
Samsung’s new watch has medical sensors that scan below the skin and read data deep inside veins.
Stanford University doctors are using iPhones to photograph the inside of the eye.
No kidding! States that accepted ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion face unanticipated health expenses.
VA hospital administrators close operating rooms at 3 p.m.
ObamaCare causes hospitals to cut back on charity care.
Reference pricing for elective surgeries saved one large public employer $5.5 million in two years.
77 percent of doctors sanctioned by New York State Department of Health continue to practice.
We recently noted that, halfway through the year, only four hospitals and 50 physicians have achieved the federal government’s goals for “meaningful use” of electronic health records (EHRS). The federal government has a goal of spending $30 billion to induce hospitals and physicians to adopt EHRs, and it still has about $8 billion to spend. In order to ensure the money keeps flowing, standards have been lowered:
The new rule, released May 20 and slated to be published in the Federal Register May 23, would enable providers to use the 2011 edition of certified electronic health record technology for Stage 1 or Stage 2 in 2014. They would have the option to attest to the 2013 definition of Meaningful Use core and menu items and use the 2013 definition of clinical quality measures. (FierceHealth EMR)
So, hospitals and physician practices which received handouts in previous years are pretty much guaranteed to receive a handout this year, just by resubmitting the old paperwork.
Emergency department visits for traumatic brain injury increased 29.1 percent, 2006-2010.
Early ObamaCare 2015 premium notices have double digit hikes.
Medicaid expansion creates poverty by punishing work.
Price transparency: Three major insurers to publish provider prices online in 2015.
Study: Surgeries take 25 percent less time in ambulatory surgery centers than hospitals.
No matter what kind of health plan consumers choose, they will find fewer doctors and hospitals in their network — or pay much more for the privilege of going to any provider they want. These so-called narrow networks, featuring limited groups of providers, have made a big entrance on the newly created state insurance exchanges, where they are a common feature in many of the plans.
Smaller networks are also becoming more common in health care coverage offered by employers and in private Medicare Advantage plans. Insurers, ranging from national behemoths like WellPoint, UnitedHealth and Aetna to much smaller local carriers, are fully embracing the idea, saying narrower networks are essential to controlling costs and managing care. Major players contend they can avoid the uproar that crippled a similar push in the 1990s.
“We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” said Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, an insurer in Golden Valley, Minn., that is owned by two health systems and a physician group. “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.”
