As healthcare reform expands coverage, nonphysician providers are seeking to expand their portfolio of licensed services and are facing intense opposition from doctors to their efforts.
In California, three bills before the Legislature propose to expand the scope of practice for nurse practitioners, optometrists and pharmacists, with one bill advancing and two bills being stalled.
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Lee
Some of California’s top insurers, including Kaiser Permanente, are protesting the state’s plans to drop quality ratings from insurance listings when its exchange goes public on Oct. 1.
Covered California executive director Peter Lee told the Los Angeles Times that the data behind existing quality ratings were too out of date. He also fears the plans sold on the exchanges will be very different from the individual policies that formed the basis for the star-based grades (this is movie-land).
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Medical journals and healthcare publications may soon notice more readers taking deep research dives into their archives looking for old studies, reports and articles on defensive medicine. That's because California's landmark 1975 Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act—which limits pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice lawsuits to $250,000—is coming under fire from two fronts.
The Consumer Watchdog organization and “medical negligence survivors” are working to get the Troy and Alana Pack Patient Safety Act, a ballot initiative, on the November ballot. Named after the children killed in a 2003 accident, the measure would require hospitals to subject physicians to random drug and alcohol testing, require mandatory testing after an unexpected death or serious injury, and adjust the $250,000 cap for inflation. That would raise the cap to $1.1 million. It needs to get about 750,000 signatures to get on the ballot.
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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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Wachter
Dr. Robert Wachter, a pioneer in the field of hospitalist medicine, has been elected to board of directors of IPC the Hospitalist Co., a North Hollywood, Calif.-based hospital medicine and physician group practice company operating in 28 states.
Wachter, a professor and associate chair at the University of California at San Francisco who just finished his term as chairman of the American Board of Internal Medicine, will chair the IPC board's quality committee.
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The for-profit assisted-living industry came under the harsh spotlight of PBS' “Frontline” investigators Tuesday night as the news program took Seattle-based Emeritus Corp. to task for a number of deaths and injuries involving residents with dementia at Emeritus facilities across the country.
Emeritus, which was founded in 1983 and has 483 facilities around the country, is the one of the country's biggest assisted-living operators.
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Many popular mobile health applications may help improve your fitness and well-being, but users should weigh those benefits against the likely loss of privacy from the personal information they extract in return for their services, according to new reports by a California-based privacy rights group.
Unbeknownst to most users, “(m)ore than 75% of the free mobile health apps and 45% of the paid apps we researched use some kind of behavioral tracking, often through multiple third-party analytics tools,” and often with multiple tracking devices operating simultaneously.
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First Aetna, and now UnitedHealth.
United, the nation's largest health insurer based on enrollment, followed in the footsteps of Aetna's move last month and decided to exit California's individual market. That includes leaving the state's individual health insurance exchange after saying it would participate, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.
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A University of Texas academic has concluded after pouring over Kaiser Permanente's proposed rates for its exchange offerings in California that the high rate on its lowest-cost health insurance plan is not due to the plan's generosity.
Comparing Kaiser's proposed “bronze” offering to its existing plans for healthy young adults, the researcher wrote on The Incidental Economist blog that the new premium, at $205 a month, will be more than double the old premium. Yet the benefits and available provider network (they both used Kaiser) will be essentially the same.
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