Policy and Legislation
A new report published recently online in the journal Health Affairs showed that 94.2 percent of the non-elderly population in Massachusetts had health insurance, a significant increase over the 86.6 percent who were insured prior to the state's health reforms.
The American Medical Society sent Congress a letter yesterday urging lawmakers to use excess baseline budget projections for military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan to fix Medicare's sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula and avert a 27 percent cut to physician payments set to begin on March 1.
Despite efforts by some religious organizations to be exempt from its provisions, the Obama Administration announced Friday that employers must offer health benefits that provide coverage for contraceptive services without charging a co-pay, co-insurance or a deductible.
The Ohio Department of Public Health and the year-old Governor's Office of Health Transformation (OHT) announced Wednesday that the state will invest $1 million to help primary care practices transition to a patient-centered medical home model.
Growth in U.S. health spending remained slow in 2010 and the health share of the gross domestic product was unchanged from 2009, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has reported. But a nationally recognized economist is saying the federal agency is overlooking the bigger picture.
Most of the Medicare fee-for-service demonstration projects launched in the past two decades using disease management and value-based payments have failed to reduce costs, says a report issued yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office.
A Miami-area resident pleaded guilty Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Miami for her role in a Medicare fraud scheme that resulted in the submission of more than $200 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare, announced the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Spurred by federal funding to upgrade enrollment systems and incentive programs to encourage increased coverage, more than half of the states expanded and simplified their Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Programs' eligibility, enrollment and renewal procedures in 2011, according to a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Insurance exchanges have to be up and running in all of the states by October 2013 in order to be able to cover people by January 1, 2014.
If the states don't do it, the feds have to be ready with a fallback exchange.
Jon Huntsman, one of the Republican candidates with a background of instituting new healthcare measures, dropped out of the presidential race yesterday.