Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| The Future of Free Market Health Care There is a way to use health insurance exchanges to both reform our health care entitlements and reduce premiums for those with private insurance... |
| Digital Shift Swells Profits for Electronic Medical Record Industry Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, a firm that lobbied heavily for government support of digital medical records, witnessed its annual sales more than double from $548 million in 2009 to $1.44 billion in 2012... |
| Federal Government Releases List of Health Benefits Insurers Must Offer The Affordable Care Act sets out 10 benefit categories that must be covered by most individual and small-group insurance plans at the same level as a typical employer plan, ranging from hospitalization to prescription drugs to maternity and newborn care... |
| Hospitals Chase Medicare Performance-Based Bonuses A 2008 study of Massachusetts doctors revealed that doctors who receive incentives to improve the overall health of their patients saw no better results than doctors who received no bonuses... |
| Health Insurance Exchanges Create State Problems The health insurance exchanges create the appearance of private-sector delivery but instead create politically favored monopolies... |
| Preventable Hospital Readmissions Continue to Pose Problem More than 1 million Americans wind up back in the hospital only weeks after they left for reasons that could have been prevented... |
| States Seek to Redefine Who Can Provide Care A proposal in California would allow physician assistants to treat more patients, nurse practitioners to set up independent practices, and pharmacists and optometrists to act as primary care providers... |
| Hip-Replacement Cost Hard to Pin Down Just under half -- 45 percent -- of top-ranked hospitals were able to provide a bundled price -- physician and hospital -- for the cost of a hip replacement... |
| Defensive Medicine May Be Costlier Than It Seems Several economic studies have found that states that have enacted malpractice reforms experienced a mere 2 percent to 5 percent reduction in health care spending compared to states that have not... |
| Misleading World Health Rankings Thanks to such technologies as emergency incubators, the U.S. neonatal mortality rate has dropped to just 5 percent today from 95 percent in the 1960s... |
