Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| Report Finds Most Errors at Hospitals Go Unreported Hospital employees report only one out of every seven mistakes or accidents that occur in the treatment of Medicare patients... |
| Workplaces Ban Not Only Smoking, but Smokers Themselves Health care costs for tobacco users are $3,000 to $4,000 more each year than for non-smokers... |
| Vast Web of Federal Regulation Causing Drug Shortages The number of drug shortages rose to 267 in 2011 from 211 in 2010; as recently as 2004, just 58 drugs were in short supply... |
| Obesity Linked to Lower Paychecks In 2010, the average annual cost of being obese was $4,879 for a woman and $2,646 for a man, including both indirect and direct costs... |
| Permanent Patients New York City is estimated to have 300 "permanent patients" throughout the city, costing hospitals millions of dollars per year... |
| Can Coverage Be Rescinded When Negative Trial Results Threaten a Popular Procedure? To attain the anticipated benefits of increased investments in comparative effectiveness research, the results must translate into improved medical practice and policy... |
| Why Medicaid Is No Longer a Voluntary Program States are technically free to opt out of Medicaid, but this would mean the forfeiture of the federal funds that the state currently receives to subsidize its programs... |
| Medicare Whac-A-Mole John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, says that the government's chronic Medicare projection mistakes are because analysts failed to account for increased demand as 19 million people were given free access to unlimited health care... |
| Wait Times for Surgery Vault to Record High in Canada Canadians seeking surgical or other therapeutic treatment faced a median wait time of 19.0 weeks in 2011, the longest wait time since 1993... |
| Modern Medicine Is Undergoing Industrialization Accountable Care Organizations and the entirety of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act perpetuate a system of price controls and limits on program expenses that have increasingly plagued the health care sector in recent decades... |
