David Williams
Medicare is the ever-growing elephant dragging the country under, so I’m pleased to see that its beneficiaries are starting to feel a bit of a squeeze.
Chief among Sarah Palin’s assaults on truth and reason is her contention that providing reimbursement for end-of-life planning sessions with a health care provider is tantamount to a “death panel” where a “bureaucrat can decide based on a subjective judgment of [a person's] ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
It’s encouraging to see the California HealthCare Foundation tackle the issue of unnecessary nursing home to hospital transfers that occur in the last weeks of life.
Medical malpractice reform is one of the few health care policy issues where there is a real possibility of agreement between the White House and Congress.
Medicare coverage for home care visits has a checkered history. The original rationale for including home care in Medicare was straightforward and compelling: it's much cheaper, healthier and pleasant for a patient to be at home receiving skilled care than to stay in a hospital for lack of enough support in the home environment.
My crystal ball is a little foggy so I decided to ask my Twitter followers to help compile a list of health care predictions for 2011. I've integrated my thoughts with theirs and organized the predictions into four themes.
"Check Back in a Generation to See if the Health Law Withstands Challenge" suggests the New York Times in an insightful piece, which suggests Social Security as a useful comparison.
The government has decided to exempt limited benefits plans (also known as mini-med plans) from rules requiring minimum medical loss ratios. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), most plans will be required to pay out at least 80 or 85 percent of premiums on medical care.
The 2010 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey finds the US lags behind other rich countries in health care system performance.
Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are supposed to control costs and improve quality under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Everyone seems to be maneuvering toward creating or participating in an ACO, even if no one is quite sure what exactly they will be.