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Patient-safety issues raised by the critics of limits on resident duty hours have not materialized. But concerns about doctors-in-training spending less time with patients appear to be valid, according to two new studies in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education set an 80-hour weekly work limit (averaged over four weeks) in 2003. Further limits, including restricting first-year residents to 16-hour shifts went into effect in 2011. The movement to limit resident work hours was originally driven by Sidney Zion, a journalist, prosecutor and novelist, whose 18-year-old daughter Libby died a few hours after being admitted to New York Hospital on the night of March 4, 1984. His fight led to New York state limiting residents to an 80-hour workweek and 24-hour shifts in 1989.
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A prominent organization representing internal medicine physicians has launched a public relations campaign to, well, tell the public what internal medicine physicians do.
For one thing, the Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians, with 137,000 members, wants the public to understand that there is a big difference between internists and interns. One is a board-certified doctor of internal medicine, while the other is medical school graduate in his or her first year of post-graduate training. Who knew?
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Delays in key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act last week last week are spawning congressional actions this week.
The Obama administration's surprise July 2 announcement that it will delay for one year the requirement that large employers provide qualifying insurance coverage for their workers or face tax penalties spurred told-you-sos from Republicans in Congress.
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Providers may have good reason to worry about a 2014 surge in patients covered by health plans with high deductibles and copays.
One of the first examinations of deductibles and copays in states where health insurance exchange plan rates have been filed found both types of cost-sharing amounts will jump from current levels. The review of exchange filings by HealthPocket in seven states—California, Connecticut, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington—found that average copays in the individual market will jump 46% from a national average of $28 to $41 in the exchanges' lowest-cost bronze plans.
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