Kaiser Health News
The University of California regents have agreed to pay nearly $8.5 million to settle two lawsuits alleging a well-known UCLA spine surgeon failed to disclose his conflicts of interest with a leading device maker before using the company's products in harmful surgeries.
In one of the first looks at privately insured patients with opioid problems, researchers paint a grim picture: Medical services for people with opioid dependence diagnoses skyrocketed more than 3,000 percent between 2007 and 2014. The study considers a huge cohort of people who have either job-based insurance or buy coverage on their own.
The study, published online by the journal Pediatrics, reviewed the medical records and conducted interviews with clinicians and parents of 305 children who were readmitted within 30 days to Boston Children's Hospital between December 2012 and February 2013. It excluded planned readmissions such as those for chemotherapy.
Their findings are important because, under the health law, services that the task force assigns an "A" or "B" grade must generally be covered by health plans, including Medicare, without charging consumers anything out of pocket.
The federal government released its first overall hospital quality rating on Wednesday, slapping average or below average scores on many of the nation's best-known hospitals while awarding top scores to many unheralded ones.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) said internal Olympus emails about that decision, detailed for the first time in a Los Angeles Times/Kaiser Health News article on Sunday, were "incredibly disturbing" and the company officials involved should face questions at a Congressional hearing.
With Medicare's specific approval, a health insurance company can enroll a member of its marketplace or other commercial plan into its Medicare Advantage coverage when that individual becomes eligible for Medicare.
Anxiety and suspense are building in Kentucky as a potential clash over the state's high-achieving Medicaid expansion nears next month between Gov. Matt Bevin and the Obama administration.
Generic drug price hikes have come under close scrutiny lately, as reports continue to surface of significant and seemingly inexplicable increases, often for widely used drugs like levothyroxine or digoxin, a heart medicine, whose out-of-pocket costs to consumers have been modest for years.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling on doctors to more aggressively screen pregnant women for the Zika virus and to take advantage of new testing technology to improve the diagnosis, follow-up and monitoring of those who have been infected.