Kaiser Health News
An apparently deadlocked Supreme Court is asking lawyers in a closely watched health law case to provide more information on how women working for religious employers might be able to get insurance coverage for contraception without violating the rights of their bosses. The order also included a request for information about a scenario that might be a possible compromise in the case.
Authors liken drug loans to mortgages, noting that both can enable consumers to buy big-ticket items requiring a hefty up-front payment that they could not otherwise afford.
The policy took effect last year and applies only to Medicare Advantage members, not to the plans CMS oversees in the health law's marketplaces.
When California's aid-in-dying law takes effect this June, terminally ill patients who decide to end their lives could be faced with a hefty bill for the lethal medication. It retails for more than $3,000.
Although primary care doctors frequently see patients with depression, they typically do less to help those patients manage it than they do for patients with other chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma or congestive heart failure, a recent study found.
Soon after doctors at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center traced deadly infections to tainted medical scopes last year, they pressed the device maker to lend them replacements. But Olympus Corp. refused. Instead, the Tokyo company offered to sell UCLA 35 new scopes for $1.2 million -- a 28 percent increase in price from what it charged the university just months earlier, according to university emails obtained from a public-records request.
Healthy Indiana pushes Medicaid's traditional boundaries, which is why it has the attention of other conservative states. The plan demands something from all enrollees, even those below the poverty line. The poorest Hoosiers can get coverage with vision and even dental benefits, but only if they make small monthly contributions to individual accounts similar to health savings accounts.
Montana's new Medicaid expansion just got its first progress report, and it is exceeding expectations.
Prime Healthcare Services Inc., a fast-growing national hospital chain, said a malware attack disrupted computer servers on Friday at two of its California hospitals, Chino Valley Medical Center in Chino and Desert Valley Hospital in Victorville.
The percentage of drugs requiring coinsurance has climbed steadily, increasing from 35 percent in 2014 to 45 percent last year. That percentage is approaching two-thirds of all covered drugs.