Kaiser Health News
In its toughest crackdown yet on medical errors, the federal government is cutting payments to 721 hospitals for having high rates of infections and other patient injuries.
Researchers and advocates worry the NIH may use that money for research not related to children's health.
More than 1 million people selected a health plan during the fourth week of the health law's open enrollment and nearly 2.5 million have done so since it began Nov. 15, federal officials said Tuesday.
Independent Bill Walker, who won election last month in a governor's race so tight the results weren't known a week after the voting was over, campaigned on the promise that he'd expand Medicaid as one of his first orders of business.
Dr. Oliver Korshin, a 71-year-old ophthalmologist in Anchorage, is not happy about the federal government's plan to have all physicians use electronic medical records or face a Medicare penalty.
A California health care workers' union is collecting signatures to get two measures onto the ballot that it says would lower health care costs, but hospitals disagree.
The Leapfrog Group is out with its second round of hospital safety ratings, and what a difference a few months has made.
At a time when the nursing home industry is lobbying Congress to avoid cuts in Medicare payments, a federal watchdog agency is reporting that taxpayers overpaid nursing homes $1.5 billion.
President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, say they want to avert the fiscal cliff, that toxic mix of expiring tax breaks and automatic spending reductions set to begin in January. If Republicans make concessions on taxes, Democrats and the president say, they'll move on entitlements, such as Medicare and Medicaid, as part of a larger deal to reduce the federal deficit.
The House Republican plan to repeal President Barack Obama's health law and turn Medicaid into a block grant program would save the federal government $1.7 trillion from 2013 to 2022, a 38-percent spending reduction, according to a recent report by the Urban Institute for the Kaiser Family Foundation.