Kaiser Health News

Crowded emergency departments have been vexing patients and hospital staff for years as consumers have increasingly sought care there. But a new study finds that many of the busiest facilities have yet to adopt several well regarded measures to reduce the wait and minimize delays.

The state is the first to receive federal permission to revamp drug and alcohol treatment for beneficiaries of Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal in California. Through what's known as a drug waiver, state officials will have new spending flexibility as they try to improve outcomes and reduce social and financial costs of people with substance abuse disorders.

State insurance exchanges are healthy financially even without the federal funding that ran out this year, a top Obama administration official told a House subcommittee Tuesday. But that official refused to predict if any of the remaining 13 state exchanges would eventually need to shift to the federal exchange.

Among uninsured individuals who are not exempt from the Affordable Care Act penalty, the average household fine for not having insurance in 2015 will be $661, rising to $969 per household in 2016, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.

Cigna CEO David Cordani says the individual market created by the 2010 health law would be better off if insurers were given more flexibility in designing coverage, as well as a more compressed, focused open enrollment period.

Nearly 1 in 5 physicians now employ medical scribes, many provided by a vendor, who join doctors and patients in examination rooms.

Forty-five percent of the silver-level PPO plans coming to the market for the first time in 2016 provide no annual cap for policyholders' out-of-network costs, an analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation finds.

The facility is slated to be renamed the Krispy Kreme Challenge Children's Specialty Clinic, but criticism from the medical community at the University of North Carolina and elsewhere is making the health care system rethink that choice.

While the average premium for the least expensive closed network silver plan--principally HMOs--rose from $274 to $299, a 9 percent increase, the average premium for the least expensive PPO or other silver-level open access plan grew from $291 to $339, an 17 percent jump.

Many co-op plans were priced low, and customers poured in. But these new customers had high health costs, so the co-ops had to start paying a lot of bills. The math didn't add up