Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| 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... |
| Many Companies May Drop Employee Coverage under ObamaCare A 2011 McKinsey survey found that 30 percent of employers would "definitely or probably" drop health insurance after 2014... |
| Rolling Back the War on Vaccines Only 60 percent of U.S. parents of children age 24 months to 35 months adhered to the recommended vaccination schedule in 2009... |
| Labor Unions Regret Backing Affordable Care Act as Costs Rise Sheet Metal Workers Local 85 in Atlanta estimates the Affordable Care Act's requirements will add between 50 cents and $1 an hour to the cost of members' compensation packages... |
| Some Families to Be Priced out of Health Overhaul A glitch in the health insurance reform law means close to 500,000 children could remain uninsured... |
| How Entrepreneurs Could Solve Medicare's Problems Under Medicare reforms proposed by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), savings would amount to an estimated $2.4 trillion annually by mid-century compared to the status quo, say John C. Goodman, president and CEO of the NCPA, Greg Scandlen, founder of Consumers for Health Care Choice, and Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the NCPA... |
| Expanding Medicaid Eligibility May Not Be Good for States The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government will spend $642 billion to expand coverage under Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program between 2012 and 2022... |
| Penalty Could Keep Smokers out of Health Overhaul For a 55-year-old smoker, the tobacco penalty in the Affordable Care Act could reach nearly $4,250 a year... |
