Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| Medicare Premium Support Is Not Radical In 2008, about one in six Medicare beneficiaries (about 7 million seniors) purchased extra Medigap insurance in the private market... |
| Shopping around for Surgery In 2006 only 10 percent of workers had to pay at least $1,000 before their insurer picked up the rest of the bill, but this figure had more than tripled by 2010... |
| Is U.S. Health Spending on Another Planet? The U.S. health system as a whole is massive, accounting for more than one-third of an estimated $6.4 trillion in health expenditures across the world in 2009... |
| Some Physicians Are Not Always Open or Honest With Patients Approximately one-third of physicians surveyed did not completely agree with disclosing serious medical errors to patients... |
| Hospitals Mine Their Patients' Records In Search Of Customers When the Henry Ford Health System promoted mammograms last year in mailings to 30,000 women aged 40 or older, more than 5,700 responded -- 304 more than in the control group... |
| New Way to Pay Doctors Part of medical providers' compensation could be tied to goals such as avoiding hospital readmissions under a new UnitedHealth Group Inc. payment plan... |
| Hospitals Overpay for Devices Medicare spent $19.8 billion on procedures involving implantable devices in 2009, up from $16.1 billion in 2004... |
| Health Reform Law Repeats Failed Policies Government mandates for required health care provisions have grown from only a handful in the 1960s to 2,156 as of 2010... |
| The Job-Killing Medical Device Tax The medical device tax would add approximately $3 billion annually to the taxes paid by medical device firms -- a 100 percent increase... |
| New Medicaid Report Finds Health Reform Law Insurer Fee Costly to States A provision of the health reform law intended to tax health insurance companies to help fund coverage expansions will end up costing the states themselves about $13.6 billion and the federal government about $24.8 billion... |
