Tag: "Health Care Access"

Iowa Medicaid Expansion Puts People in Private Plans

Under the proposal, state residents with annual household incomes of up to 100% of the federal poverty level would obtain coverage through a state-run health plan, while those with incomes from 101% to 138% of FPL would be able to use federal Medicaid funding to purchase private health coverage through the state’s health insurance exchange. The plan is expected to expand coverage to about 115,000 newly eligible state residents

From R. Adams, CQ HealthBeat, 5/23 (gated).

May 24, 2013 | 7 comments | by

Family Medical Costs Still Rising, and Other Links

The typical cost to cover a family of four now exceeds $22,000, including the amount paid in insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, according to Milliman.

Can dyslexia be good for you?

An iPhone application lets users check levels of blood, protein and other substances in their urine. (I’m trying to imagine how that would work?)

May 24, 2013 | 17 comments | by

Solution for Elder Care: Robots

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed Cody, a robotic nurse the university says is “gentle enough to bathe elderly patients.” There is also HERB, which is short for Home Exploring Robot Butler. Made by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, it is designed to fetch household objects like cups and can even clean a kitchen. Hector, a robot that is being developed by the University of Reading in England, can remind patients to take their medicine, keep track of their eyeglasses and assist in the event of a fall.

The technology is nearly there. But some researchers worry that we are not asking a fundamental question: Should we entrust the care of people in their 70s and older to artificial assistants rather than doing it ourselves? (NYT)

May 22, 2013 | 11 comments | by

Should Popular People Get More Health Care?

This is from Tyler Cowen:

By now it is well known that hanging out with healthy peers predicts (causes?) good health, and unhealthy peers predict (cause?) bad health, for instance as it applies to weight and diet. So what might that mean?

Is it, therefore, socially optimal to invest scarce health care resources in the most popular people ― considering the external effects on the health of others? Tyler has references and links.

May 20, 2013 | 10 comments | by

Insurance Matters

Medigap added to Medicare means more spending:

[E]mployer-sponsored and self-purchased supplemental coverage were associated with annual spending growth rates of 7.17 percent and 7.18 percent, respectively, compared to 6.08 percent for beneficiaries without supplemental coverage. In the first empirical study of the topic, the researchers found significantly higher rates of spending growth in all supplemental insurance categories compared to the category without supplemental insurance, even while controlling for sociodemographic, disease, disability, and health behavior characteristics. Golberstein and his colleagues suggest that policy efforts to restrict the generosity of Medicare supplemental insurance plans, and the anticipated lower levels and lower generosity of employer-sponsored supplemental Medicare coverage for future retirees, could slow the rate of spending growth for Medicare beneficiaries. (Health Affairs)

May 20, 2013 | 10 comments | by

What If the Exchanges Aren’t Ready?

This is from my column today in The Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration wants something the federal government has never done before: a computer system that connects HHS, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, Homeland Security and perhaps other departments as well. This is a herculean task with unclear benefits. For perspective, consider that the Veterans Administration converted to electronic medical records in 1998 and the VA and the Department of Defense have been unsuccessfully trying to share records ever since. Even though they have spent millions of dollars on the effort, it now appears that the two agencies are abandoning the goal altogether.

May 20, 2013 | 12 comments | by

Bill Gates: Is No Government Better Than Lousy Government?

I was completely surprised that nobody was funding some of these vaccines. When I first looked at this I thought, well, all the good stuff will have been done. It was mind-blowing me to find things like Rotavirus vaccine were going unfunded. One hundred percent of rich kids were getting it and no poor kids were. So over a quarter million kids a year were dying of Rotavirus-caused diarrhea. You could save those lives for $800 per life. That’s like $20 or $30 per year of life. It’s just ridiculous that an intervention like that isn’t funded.

And I’m really surprised at the variance. Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems and some richer ones run terrible programs. The north of Nigeria has about 30 percent vaccination coverage, and they’re above average in terms of wealth within Africa. You compare that to, say, Somalia, which has absolutely no government at all, and they get about 60 percent vaccine coverage of children. So you have a place literally with no government getting a better vaccine coverage than a place that’s above average wealth.

This is from an interview with Ezra Klein.

May 17, 2013 | 13 comments | by

The Entitlement Society

Later this month, the American Psychiatric Association will unveil the fifth edition of its handbook of diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourteen years in the making, the D.S.M.-5 has been the subject of seemingly endless discussion.

But many critics overlook a surprising fact about the new D.S.M.: how little attention practicing psychiatrists will give to it.

This is because psychiatrists tend to treat according to symptoms.

So why the fuss over D.S.M.-5? Because of the unwarranted clout that its diagnoses carry with the rest of society: They are the passports to insurance coverage, the keys to special educational and behavioral services in school and the tickets to disability benefits.

Entire NYT editorial here.

May 16, 2013 | 12 comments | by

Best Analysis of the Oregon Medicaid Experiment I Have Seen

In summary, based on statistically insignificant effects of coverage from the Oregon Experiment: (1) The effects that are closest to statistical significance are that coverage would increase the rate of smoking and damage the cardiovascular prognosis of sick people; (2) the best estimated net effect on total population cardiovascular health is extraordinarily tiny; (3) this effect would be achieved by making the sick sicker, while very slightly improving the health of already healthy people; and (4) this effect is almost certainly unattractive on a risk-adjusted basis. This is not a series of effects that makes a very attractive argument for an increase in health from the experiment.

This is Jim Manzi via Megan McArdle. Entire piece is fascinating.

May 15, 2013 | 8 comments | by

Kaiser’s Death Panel

A worrisome abdominal pain drove Jalal Afshar to seek treatment last year at healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente…Kaiser granted his request to see a specialist in Arkansas. But it ultimately declined to pay for his treatment there. By June, Afshar said, Kaiser was arranging for hospice care so that he could die at home. Afshar, 58, refused to accept that. Despite Kaiser’s stance, he went back to Arkansas for six months of stem-cell transplants, chemotherapy and other treatments that he says saved his life. Now he owes $2 million for his care and is suing the company in state court for breach of contract and unfair business practices.

Source: LA Times.

May 13, 2013 | 17 comments | by
Next Page »