Physicians are very busy, but that busy-ness doesn't seem to stop them from taking time to post long and angry comments online.
Physicians seem most apt to take the bait when it comes to reacting to provocative posts on physician-related issues including scope of practice. But instead of offering constructive discussion, the online comments often come off as insensitive or bullying, a post published last week on the Health Affairs blog said.
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The news Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service will recognize same-sex marriages, no matter where the couples live, will have healthcare implications.
They're not necessarily positive ones, according to Brian Haile, senior vice president for healthcare policy at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service.
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Larger independent physician groups with “strong primary-care orientations” and where doctors have accepted greater financial risk deliver better quality care for Medicare beneficiaries at lower cost, according to a report in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Researchers with Harvard Medical School's healthcare policy department studied 2009 Medicare claims for almost 4.3 million beneficiaries and compared spending and quality measures for small (one to 10 doctors), medium-to-large and hospital-based physician groups. Quality measures included 30-day hospital readmissions, and mammography, diabetes and cholesterol screening for the appropriate patients.
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Physician assistants and nurse practitioners increasingly are specializing and can't be counted on to provide the solution to the nation's shortage of primary-care providers, a report by the American Academy of Family Physicians concluded.
Even though they're often touted as a solution to filling in patient care gaps because of a shortage of primary-care docs, not enough PAs and NPs are working in primary care to make a difference, so policymakers need to come up with better solutions to address primary-care access, the researchers said.
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A new analysis suggests that smart design of the websites used for the new state insurance exchanges to enroll consumers in health plans could save consumers and the government more than $9 billion a year.
It highlights the difficulty for consumers of choosing a health plan that best fits their healthcare and financial circumstances even in the new reform environment where they can more easily make apples-to-apples comparisons.
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A federally chartered special work group with representatives from three federal agencies has submitted its draft recommendations on establishing a regulatory framework for health IT.
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There has been significant progress in getting health information technology systems to talk to one another, according to a new study on interoperability by HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
The study, “Hospital Electronic Health Information Exchange Grew Substantially in 2008-12,” was published in the August issue of the policy journal Health Affairs. The report was written by five ONC staffers, including the lead author, Michael Furukawa, director of the ONC's Office of Economic Analysis, Evaluate and Modeling, and contributor Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the ONC chief.
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Fledgling accountable care organizations have faced plenty of challenges. Now a group of economists and lawyers are calling for a close look at issues involving insurance, antitrust and other regulation to avoid “unintended consequences.”
Health policy experts Gary Bacher, Michael Chernew, Daniel Kessler and Stephen Weiner write in the latest issue of the policy journal Health Affairs that ACOs could stifle competition among insurers and providers and potentially drive up prices.
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Joint replacement prices at the most costly California hospitals plunged by one-third after the state required its workers and retirees to pay out of pocket all costs above a “reference price” of $30,000 for orthopedic surgery, a new study said.
The average cost of joint replacement among high-priced hospitals dropped to $28,465 after the California Public Employees' Retirement System made the change in 2011, wrote University of California researchers James Robinson and Timothy Brown in the journal Health Affairs. That's down from $43,308 the prior year.
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Supporters of the healthcare reform law got some good news from a survey just released by the healthcare policy briefing website The Morning Consult.
Nearly half of registered voters polled in the survey—47%—said they would be less likely to vote for a member of Congress in 2014 if the member tried to defund Obamacare as part of a federal budget package, compared with 28% who said they would be more likely to vote for the member.
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Doctors asked to assess options for reducing healthcare costs were not exactly enthusiastic about replacing the system that pays them based on the volume of tests, exams and procedures they perform.
Granted, cuts to Medicare physician pay proved even less popular among the nearly 3,000 doctors surveyed on their opinions for strategies to blunt the nation's high and rising healthcare costs. Just 1% of the polled physicians described their attitude toward this option as “very enthusiastic.”
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