How can insurers justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient per year on “orphan drugs” - extremely expensive medications for rare conditions that are mostly chronic and life-threatening - when this money could provide greater overall health benefit if spread out among many other patients? Those spending decisions reflect the “rule of rescue,” […]
Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on February 9th, 2012 | No Comments »
How can insurers justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient per year on “orphan drugs” - extremely expensive medications for rare conditions that are mostly chronic and life-threatening - when this money could provide greater overall health benefit if spread out among many other patients? Those spending decisions reflect the “rule of rescue,” […]
Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on February 9th, 2012 | No Comments »
One in ten Canadians cannot afford to take their prescription drugs as directed, according to an analysis by researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. The study, published in the CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) is the first to examine the relationship between drug insurance and the use of prescription […]
Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on January 17th, 2012 | No Comments »
Insurance status doesn’t affect the quantity (or value) of imaging services received by patients in a hospital, in-patient setting, according to a study in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Approximately 51 million Americans, or 16.7 percent of the population, were without health insurance for some or all of […]
Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on January 9th, 2012 | No Comments »
Variations in health care spending by Medicare and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas (BCBSTX) are similar throughout the state despite previous research, which found significant spending differences between the private and commercial sector in McAllen, Texas…
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Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on December 22nd, 2011 | No Comments »
US states are being given more freedom and flexibility in the implementation of health reform as stipulated in the Affordable Care Act, which aims to make sure all US citizens have access to affordable, quality health insurance, according to a bulletin released by the HHS (Department of Health and Human Services)…
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Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on December 20th, 2011 | No Comments »
In the fierce national debate over a new federal law that requires all Americans to have health insurance, it’s widely assumed that private health insurance can do a better job than the public insurance funded by the U.S. government. But a first-of-its-kind analysis of newly available government data found just the opposite when it comes […]
Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on December 9th, 2011 | No Comments »
The first federally funded report to compare children with special health care needs to children without reveals 14 percent to 19 percent of children in the United States have a special health care need and their insurance is inadequate to cover the greater scope of care they require for optimal health…
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Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on December 8th, 2011 | No Comments »
Health care coverage increased dramatically in parts of China between 1997 and 2006, a period when government interventions were implemented to improve access to health care, with particularly striking upswings in rural areas, according to new research by Brown University sociologist Susan E. Short and Hongwei Xu of the University of Michigan…
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Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on December 7th, 2011 | No Comments »
Dr. Donald M. Berwick, head of Medicare and Medicaid until last Thursday, stated that up to 30% of spending on health is wasted with absolutely no benefit to beneficiaries (patients). He added that his agency’s cumbersome and archaic regulations are partly to blame…
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Filed under: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance on December 4th, 2011 | No Comments »