Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 50
Lori Eng, a 62-year-old office manager who works in western Nebraska, sent an email not long ago telling me she was “terrified” she might lose her Obamacare health insurance. The many horror stories passed along in the media had frightened her, and she wanted me to hear from someone who had benefitted from the law. No wonder Eng is scared. Ever since the Affordable Care Act passed almost seven years ago, opponents, mostly Republicans, have vowed to repeal the law and replace it with a different plan. The November election results now make tha...
Will patients benefit from the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act? After listening to politicians and reading the headlines, most people might think it’s the best thing ever to come along for patients. “A new day for medical research is on the horizon,” proclaimed Rep. Fred Upton, the outgoing chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which had just won a major victory last week. “The House and the Senate have passed this bipartisan legislation which will ensure our health system can keep pace with incredible advances in science...
Even though the election is over and Republicans are in a position to repeal and replace Obamacare as they’ve been vowing to do for several years, that doesn’t mean you should avoid signing up for 2017 insurance coverage. If you’re eligible and need insurance, the state shopping exchanges are open for business even if options this year are limited in many counties, particularly in rural areas. More than 40 percent of the counties where residents can buy an Obamacare policy have just one insurer selling them. That’s not a lot of choice, and pol...
The fight in California over a ballot initiative that would begin to control the price of pharmaceuticals paid by state programs shows how difficult it is to “do something” about the high price of prescription drugs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. drug spending rose 7 percent this year - the biggest increase in 24 years – and most Americans now think drug prices are unreasonable. So it’s not surprising the pharmaceutical industry is running scared and, with its deep pockets, is spending big to convince millions of Califor...
Recently I got a note from a reader of these columns who lives in Warren, Ohio. He had seen conflicting reports about next year’s insurance premiums. The man was skeptical of an article he had read, which reported that insurance premiums are cheaper than they were in 2010, and that the Affordable Care Act will cost $2.6 trillion less than estimated. Somehow that didn’t compute with what he had read about premiums going up. He was right to be skeptical, and his comments are important because they zoom right in on the spin that’s been circu...
Is the message that the nation is getting too fat beginning to sink in? The answer is “yes but,” says the Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit, non-partisan group that aims to protect the health of communities and make disease prevention a national priority. And a study of healthcare quality and quantity across the nation suggests some reasons why things are not improving uniformly. Obesity is a disease, and for the last 13 years the Trust and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have monitored obesity rates in the country, focusing on the p...
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently signaled to the nation’s hospitals that it was getting serious-and tough-about patient safety and the quality of care hospitals provide. The government’s rating system-five stars for the best hospitals and one star for the worst-sends a message that patients have a right to know what’s going on inside the hospitals they entrust with their lives or those of their family members. The overall star ratings, the first for CMS, are a composite of 64 measures the government has used the p...
Nearly two-thirds of adults over age 70 have hearing loss that doctors consider “clinically meaningful.” In plain English that means as people age, they are likely to become hard of hearing. Many of those people, however, don’t get the help they need, often because they simply cannot afford it. “The prevalence of hearing loss almost doubles with each age decade of life,” says Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins University, but for older people, he adds, “there are multiple barriers that prevent individuals from getting the...
An Indiana couple who wrote to me a few weeks ago has experienced the ups and downs of Obamacare, and they wanted me to know about one downside they now face---a monthly premium of $836. “No one should have to pay those high premiums unless you’re considered high class, and we aren’t,” the woman said. The couple-she is 59 and he is 62-are self-employed, and their income fluctuates. At first the Affordable Care Act was, a “godsend,” the woman told me. Before they signed up for Obamacare, they were paying almost $1,000 a month for insurance c...
Who protects consumers of healthcare? Two recent emails from readers got me thinking about that question. I don’t mean consumers in their role as patients whose medical well-being is looked after by state medical boards and health departments that police doctors and hospitals. Those organizations don’t always do a perfect job protecting patients from harm, but at least they are in place. But who protects patients when things go wrong on healthcare’s financial side? What happens when you receive a bill you didn’t expect and can’t afford to...
Who protects consumers of healthcare? Two recent emails from readers got me thinking about that question. I don’t mean consumers in their role as patients whose medical well-being is looked after by state medical boards and health departments that police doctors and hospitals. Those organizations don’t always do a perfect job protecting patients from harm, but at least they are in place. But who protects patients when things go wrong on healthcare’s financial side? What happens when you receive a bill you didn’t expect and can’t afford to...
If you need a risky, complicated surgery, would you go to a hospital or surgeon who had performed the procedure only a time or two before? Most people would say no, but the evidence indicates otherwise. Patients do go to doctors and hospitals that have seldom performed the procedures they need. Yet, for almost 40 years, study after study has shown that patients’ death rates were significantly lower for surgeries done at hospitals that were experienced in the procedure. The same is true for physicians. In March, for example, a large study of p...
Judy Norblade, a retired marketing director, and her husband, Paul, a retired teacher, thought they had all their financial bases covered. They had Medicare, good supplemental coverage from a Medigap policy, a drug plan that paid for most of their prescriptions and long-term-care insurance for a nursing home they hoped they would never need. “I thought we were pretty well set for healthcare in our retirement years,” she said. Then the Norblades bumped head on into a notorious Medicare rule that has caught thousands of families off guard ove...
Those of us who grew up in small rural communities in the 1950s and 60s, expected to have longer life spans than our parents. The trends were in our favor. White women born in 1900 could expect to live, on average, just shy of 49 years; white men 46.6 years. Those were our grandparents and our neighbors. By 1950, life expectancy had climbed to 72 years for white women born that year and 66.5 for white men. By 2000, life expectancy was still increasing, with female babies expected to live to nearly 80 and males to almost 75. America was on the r...
What would make your medicines cheaper? That’s a question Americans are asking every time they go to the pharmacy and find the price of a maintenance drug they’ve been taking has doubled or tripled, or that a new medicine, like one of the new diabetes drugs, their doctors have prescribed is beyond their means. Increasingly the answer from the drug industry, which pretty much can charge whatever it wishes, is more patient assistance programs that come in the form of coupons, co-pay cards, or vouchers to help people buy their drugs. People nee...
During a recent visit to Copenhagen, I squeezed in a visit with city officials to learn more about the Danish health system particularly the country’s arrangements for long-term care, a topic that draws endless complaints from American families, including many readers of this column. Coincidentally, the day I returned home, I learned the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs both programs, had just released star ratings for the country’s home care agencies that provide services to nearly 5 million Americans. The home hea...
Not many of us think about needing air ambulances. We don’t dwell on that possibility, but for people hurt in car accidents or who live in smaller or rural communities without medical care at hand, being airlifted to a hospital can mean the difference between life and death. Increasingly, the service also can mean the difference between getting well at a price you can afford or at a price that could push you over a financial cliff. Air ambulances have become the centerpiece of a nationwide dispute over balance billing, a practice that r...
What would make your medicines cheaper? That’s a question Americans are asking every time they go to the pharmacy and find the price of a maintenance drug they’ve been taking has doubled or tripled, or that a new medicine, like one of the new diabetes drugs, their doctors have prescribed is beyond their means. Increasingly the answer from the drug industry, which pretty much can charge whatever it wishes, is more patient assistance programs that come in the form of coupons, co-pay cards, or vouchers to help people buy their drugs. People nee...
When the presidential race begins to focus seriously on issues, you’re likely to hear a lot about Social Security and to some extent Medicare. The nub of debate will center on two questions: Should we cut Social Security or expand it? Should Medicare beneficiaries assume more of the cost of their healthcare and reduce the government’s obligation over time? The questions are connected. In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-of-center think tank, argued that a b...
More health insurance upheaval is coming your way. The value of your health insurance is shrinking, and you may be paying more for less this year and in years to come. Perhaps your employer has taken away the choice of plans with large provider networks and instead is offering those with a much narrower selection of doctors and hospitals. Some companies are enticing workers with lower premiums if they leave preferred provider organizations (PPOs), which let them use any provider, and choose health savings accounts. These are tax-advantaged...
Last winter Tammy Fogall, a reader in Colorado, told me about her family’s “troubled summer vacation,” as she called it. A visit to relatives in Ohio had turned into a medical nightmare that left the family struggling with a $12,000 bill plus a ringside seat to observe what happens when doctors and hospitals make mistakes. Shortly after they arrived in Chillicothe, her 43-year-old husband, a retired Army National Guard staff sergeant, suffered a burst appendix that neither doctors at a local VA clinic or a small regional hospital where he wa...
At the end of its 2014-15 term the Supreme Court decided that the key component of the Affordable Care Act---the tax subsidies available to help people buy health insurance---would continue in all states. Justices addressed a challenge that the subsidies were legal only in the 17 states that ran their own shopping exchanges and not in the rest that chose to use the marketplaces operated by the federal government. That’s good news for the more than six million Americans whose subsidies were in doubt. The government’s own statistics make cle...
Not long ago my husband showed up with a sandwich for lunch that he bought at a local supermarket. I thought it was going to be our usual: turkey and provolone with lettuce on a hard roll, always plenty for both of us. At $6.50, how could you go wrong? This time the sandwich was different. It now cost $9.50 and was piled high with turkey and cheese on a roll that was much bigger than what we were used to. In short, it was awful—enough meat and cheese for four people on squishy bread that tasted more like a morning sweet roll. But the bigger s...
The government has just announced its first-ever star ratings of the country’s hospitals based on patients’ assessments of the care they received. Other organizations have dabbled in this ratings business, many of them to make a buck by selling their rankings. And it’s not uncommon for some of these outfits to get licensing fees from hospitals that get glowing report cards they can then use to market themselves. I’ve tended to view those ratings schemes with skepticism. The government’s ratings, however, don’t come with any of that baggage and...
Word has just come from Express Scripts, the big pharmacy benefit manager, that per capita drug spending in the U.S. increased more than 6 percent last year. When high prices for specialty drugs like the hepatitis C medicine Sovaldi is factored in, the increase is even greater. There are more expensive specialty drugs in the pipeline, and prices of traditional drugs especially generics are rising too. We know that if we’ve refilled any prescriptions. The National Coalition on Health Care, a group of businesses, healthcare providers, consumer g...
