Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| After-Hours Access to Primary Care Practices Linked to Better Care People that reported less difficulty in reaching a physician after hours had fewer emergency department visits and there were lower rates of unmet medical needs... |
| Why Raising Medicare's Retirement Age Will Help Achieve Universal Coverage Freeing up resources that would otherwise have been spent on wealthy retirees' Medicare would mean that lower-income Americans are better able to get coverage... |
| Reducing Waste in Health Care Thirty percent of all Medicare clinical care spending could be avoided without worsening health outcomes... |
| The Patient Role in Medicaid New York's Medicaid reform would coordinate and manage health care for people covered on a fee-for-service basis and place more emphasis on health education and prevention... |
| Exchanging Medicaid for Private Insurance Converting Medicaid into block grants would allow states the flexibility in designing programs that fit their individual needs, says Devon M. Herrick, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Repairing ObamaCare The Affordable Care Act is a deeply flawed law, but there are five essential changes that could fix it, says John C. Goodman, president and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Waiting Your Turn Specialist physicians surveyed across 12 specialties and 10 Canadian provinces reported an average waiting time of 17.7 weeks between general practitioner referral and an elective treatment... |
| Making Bad Drugs? Three Strikes and You're Out About 82 million doses of counterfeit drugs were seized in Africa, but a much bigger public health problem is substandard drugs that are the result of shoddy manufacturing and handling... |
| Surprise: New Insurance Fee in Health Overhaul Law A new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies... |
| Raising Medicare Eligibility a First Step toward Deficit Reduction Over the next 20 years, spending on the major entitlement programs is projected to continue to rise very rapidly, reaching 15.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2030... |
