Kaiser Health News
The NFL team will display advertisements on its Gameday show, Facebook page, and Web site promoting the health insurance marketplace.
Dr. Donald Berwick might be running for Governor of Massachusetts, but he's still got a foothold in his former life. Berwick has a long record as the leading authority on healthcare quality and now he finds himself making recommendations for improving safety and restoring confidence in England's National Health Service
Medicare will levy $227 million in fines against hospitals in every state but one for the second round of the government's campaign to reduce the number of patients readmitted within a month, according to federal records released Friday.
Everyone expects a hospital to be ready to jump into action when disaster strikes. But what about when the disaster devastates the hospital itself? Turns out, it helps a lot to have an electronic medical record system in place. At least that was the case at Moore Medical Center in Oklahoma, a small hospital right in the path of the tornado that ripped through the suburbs of Oklahoma City.
Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat, will continue focusing on implementation of the Affordable Care Act, among other top priorities, until he retires in 2014.
The Obama administration is trying once again to convince Congress to provide more funding for the health law's insurance exchanges, which are set to begin enrollment this fall.
The plan to insure as many as 27 million Americans under the federal health law beginning this fall will be the biggest expansion of health coverage since that launch. But six months before the process begins, questions are mounting about the scope and adequacy of efforts to reach out to consumers.
For 15 years, Congress has bestowed special privileges to some small remote hospitals, usually in rural areas, to help them stay afloat. Medicare pays them more than it pays most hospitals and exempts them from financial pressure to operate efficiently and requirements to reveal how their patients fare. Nearly one in four hospitals qualifies for the program. Despite these benefits, there's new evidence that the quality of many of these hospitals may be deteriorating.
Saying that the ACA "is going to be an implementation disaster," that will "hurt our economy severely," Senators including Marco Rubio insist they will only agree to a bill funding the federal government if it contains cuts to spending on the health reform law.
Computer mistakes like the one that produced incorrect prescriptions for thousands of Rhode Island patients are probably far more common and dangerous than the Obama administration wants you to believe, says Drexel University's Scot Silverstein, MD.