Healthcare – Page 3 – Healthcare-NOW

Americans Cutting Back on Drugs and Doctor Visits

By Katie Thomas for the New York Times – Patients cut back on prescription drugs and doctor visits last year, a sign that many Americans are still struggling to pay for health care, according to a study released Wednesday by a health industry research group. The report, issued by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics,…

Justices meet Friday to vote on health care case

By Mark Sherman for the AP – While the rest of us have to wait until June, the justices of the Supreme Court will know the likely outcome of the historic health care case by the time they go home this weekend. After months of anticipation, thousands of pages of briefs and more than six…

Ryan Budget May Lead to Single-Payer Health Care

By Ezra Klein for Bloomberg View – Let’s play a game: I’ll describe a health-care bill to you. Then you tell me if I’m describing President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act or the budget released this week by Representative Paul Ryan. The bill works like this: The federal government subsidizes Americans to participate in health…

Health Care Costs Will Be Higher Than Half Of Country’s Income By 2037

From Huffington Post – Health insurance will cost more than the median income of an American household by 2037 — and that’s the best-case scenario, two doctors contend in a new study. The reason: Wages for U.S. workers are stagnating and health care costs are rising so quickly that even if the health reform law…

As Court Showdown Nears, Our Healthcare System Still a Mess

By Rose Ann DeMoro – With the approaching Supreme Court showdown on the President Obama’s 2010 health care law (the Affordable Care Act, modeled, of course, on Mitt Romney’s law in Massachusetts), the U.S. healthcare system remains a dysfunctional mess, as nurses bear witness to every day. In late March, the Court will devote six…

Many Texas residents cross Mexican border to obtain healthcare

From AHRQ.gov – The U.S.-Mexico border stretches from San Diego, CA all the way to Brownsville, TX. Many residents living on the U.S. side of the border are poor and uninsured, and have difficulties accessing health care services. A new study reveals that many U.S.-border residents in Texas cross the border into Mexico for health…

The Pampered Patient: Perverting healthcare into a luxury commodity

By Jim Hightower for The Austin (Texas) Chronicle – In these times of cold health care austerity, it reaffirms one’s faith in humanity to learn that many hospitals are now going the extra mile to provide top quality care for all. For all superrich people that is – so rich that they can buy their…

Transparency for health insurance?

By Trudy Lieberman for Columbia Journalism Review – The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that health insurers and employers must provide more information to consumers shopping for health insurance. The ensuing coverage, shall we say, was a classic case of journalistic bungling. Reporters took what HHS officials fed them and crafted their…

NY Hospitals Saddle Uninsured Patients with Massive Debt Despite $100s of Millions in Gov’t Aid

From Democracy Now! – As the ranks of the uninsured continue to rise, a major new study has found that most New York medical centers are violating rules intended to help patients who are uninsured and cannot afford healthcare. Two-thirds of hospitals studied either violated the law, failed to comply with state guidelines or created…

Why Are US Health Costs So High? Follow the Bills

By Ralph Nader – Looking at millions of individual bills that makeup the 2.7 trillion dollars of annual health care costs opens a gigantic window on the massive waste, redundancy, profiteering, fraud and sometimes criminal over-billing. Here is a partial example of what I mean, in the words of Philip M. Boffey, the estimable science…