Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| Hospital Systems Branch Out as Insurers A 2011 survey of 100 hospital leaders by health research firm Advisory Board Co. found that 20 percent of them intended to market an insurance plan... |
| 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... |
