How America Is Addicted to Food: Obesity #39;s Economic, Health Care, and Societal Impact (2013)
Obesity in the United States has been increasingly cited as a major health issue in recent decades. Like the U.S., many industrialized countries have experie...
By: The Film Archive
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How America Is Addicted to Food: Obesity's Economic, Health Care, and Societal Impact (2013) - Video
Neighborhood Health Care centers close doors
Patients left with no doctor, staff left with no job.
By: wcpo
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Rotary in Action 2013: Health Care and Community Projects
This is a year-end presentation of Rotary in Action. December 25, 2013, Rotary in Action (UNTV37) Rotary in Action is a public service program hosted by the ...
By: untvweb
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Rotary in Action 2013: Health Care and Community Projects - Video
Obama on Health Care Rollout: #39;We Screwed It Up #39;
Obama admits failure on healthcare.gov rollout.
By: Truth Revolt
Continued here:
Ask the MD: What is LRRK2?
The Michael J. Fox Foundation #39;s staff Neurologist and Movement Disorder Specialist, Maurizio Facheris, MD, responds to questions from our online community. F...
By: Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson #39;s Research
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How To Talk To Family - New Health Care Ad
How To Talk To Family - New Health Care Ad http://www.barackobama.com/talk/ http://youtu.be/_6MpEoac1tk.
By: Belligerent Politics
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Buena Vista company charges #39;Health Care Act Adjustment #39;
A retired company couple spotted something on their heater repair bill that looked odd: an $11 charge for a "Health Care Adjustment." Marshall Zelinger reports.
By: 7NEWS
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Buena Vista company charges 'Health Care Act Adjustment' - Video
Feds extend health care sign up by one day
The Obama administration pushed back the ACA enrollment deadline to Dec. 24, giving uninsured Americans one more day to sign up for health care coverage that begins Jan. 1. Officials say the...
By: PBS NewsHour
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Noam Chomsky on Universal Health Care
By: Noam Chomsky Videos
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December 26th, 2013 7:50 pm by BILL BARROW, Associated Press
ATLANTA Republicans who want to regain control of the Senate will first have to do battle among themselves in 2014 primary elections, largely because of differences over how to proceed against the law they deride as Obamacare.
In a number of Senate primary campaigns, conservatives are arguing over the best way to oppose President Barack Obamas health care law. The outcome of those campaigns could affect the battle over which party controls the Senate.
In intraparty skirmishes from Georgia to Nebraska, the GOPs most strident candidates and activists are insisting on a no-holds-barred approach. They accuse fellow Republicans including several incumbent senators of being too soft in their opposition to the Affordable Care Act and to the president in general.
The struggle will help determine just how conservative the Senate Republican caucus will be during Obamas final two years. And it could influence which party controls the chamber, with Democrats hoping that the most uncompromising Republican standard-bearers will emerge from the primaries and fare as poorly in general elections as their counterparts did in several 2012 Senate races. Republicans need to gain six seats to retake the majority in the Senate.
Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who wants to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, stepped into the dispute recently when he seemed to scold much of his party during an interview on a conservative talk radio show.
A lot of conservatives say, Nah, just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own, Kingston said. Well, I dont think thats always the responsible thing to do.
Rep. Paul Broun, one of Kingstons rivals in a crowded primary field, pounced immediately, declaring in an Internet ad, I dont want to fix Obamacare, I want to get rid of it. Conservative commentators hammered Kingston with headlines like Kingston has surrendered on Obamacare.
In Tennessee, state Rep. Joe Carr blasted Sen. Lamar Alexander for serving as a key GOP negotiator in the deal to end the partial government shutdown that resulted from House Republicans efforts to deny funding for the health care law. Alexander subsequently described himself as a conservative problem solver, a characterization that Carr says typifies how out of touch he is.
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Top 4 Political Stories of the Day
Bangladesh opposition calls for protest at #39;farcical #39; election DHAKA (Reuters) - Opposition leader Begum Khaleda Zia on Tuesday urged Bangladeshis to march t...
By: WochitGeneralNews
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Health Care Deadline; Valley Girls; It #39;s a Wonderful Life
Also on the Minute, an examination of Valley Girl Speak and a performance of a scene from "It #39;s a Wonderful Life: The 1946 Live Radio Play." Subscribe on You...
By: The New York Times
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Health Care Deadline; Valley Girls; It's a Wonderful Life - Video
Myra Bastidas, MD - Pediatric Health
Myra Bastidas, MD, talks about pediatric health; advising parents and children about living healthy lifestyles. Dr. Bastidas is a pediatrician at the Kaiser ...
By: kaiserpermanenteorg
The rest is here:
By BILL BARROW Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) - Republicans who want to regain control of the Senate will first have to do battle among themselves in 2014 primary elections, due largely to differences over how to proceed against the law they deride as "Obamacare."
In a number of Senate primary campaigns, conservatives are arguing over the best way to oppose President Barack Obama's health care law. The outcome of those campaigns could affect the battle over which party controls the Senate.
In intraparty skirmishes from Georgia to Nebraska, the GOP's most strident candidates and activists are insisting on a no-holds-barred approach. They accuse fellow Republicans - including several incumbent senators - of being too soft in their opposition to the Affordable Care Act and to the president in general.
The struggle will help determine just how conservative the Senate Republican caucus will be during Obama's final two years. And it could influence which party controls the chamber, with Democrats hoping that the most uncompromising Republican standard-bearers will emerge from the primaries and fare as poorly in general elections as their counterparts did in several 2012 Senate races. Republicans need to gain six seats to retake the majority in the Senate.
Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who wants to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, stepped into the dispute recently when he seemed to scold much of his party during an interview on a conservative talk radio show.
"A lot of conservatives say, 'Nah, just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own," Kingston said. "Well, I don't think that's always the responsible thing to do."
Rep. Paul Broun, one of Kingston's rivals in a crowded primary field, pounced immediately, declaring in an Internet ad, "I don't want to fix Obamacare, I want to get rid of it." Conservative commentators hammered Kingston with headlines like "Kingston has surrendered on Obamacare."
In Tennessee, state Rep. Joe Carr blasted Sen. Lamar Alexander for serving as a key GOP negotiator in the deal to end the partial government shutdown that resulted from House Republicans' efforts to deny funding for the health care law. Alexander subsequently described himself as a "conservative problem solver," a characterization that Carr says "typifies how out of touch he is."
Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin is using a similar line of attack in trying to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as is Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel in his primary challenge to Sen. Thad Cochran. Carr, Bevin and McDaniel all say they'd be more like freshmen Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas, tea party favorites who pushed the defunding strategy and vexed their longer-serving colleagues.
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Health Care, Energy and Environment
December 26, 2013 3:07 PM
I've had a busy 2013 covering health care in Southeast Michigan, and beyond it seems, if you count writing countless articles about the Affordable Care Act and how it affects local companies and people with and without health insurance.
Health care is local, and personal, obviously, but decisions made far away from the home medicine cabinet or physician's office affect people's health and pocketbook in very real ways.
My health care coverage also includes changes and innovations from businesses such as hospitals, physician organizations, insurance companies, nursing homes, mental health providers and post-acute care providers such as home health and rehabilitation companies.
First, here are my top health care stories of the year:
Obamacare's healthcare.gov marketplace website roll-out fiasco, policy terminations, slow enrollment. Read my news analysis that created quite a controversy. I predict this story will continue well past the time I turn in my private insurance card for a Medicare card.
Hospitals, doctors, clinics prepare for insurance expansion in 2014. Will more patients equal higher profits?
Michigan legislators finally approve state Medicaid expansion. Almost a no-brainer, especially when small business groups signed on as supporters.
Beaumont, Henry Ford nix merger. Read my news feature on why it happened.
View post:
Reporter's notebook: Health care storylines to watch in 2014
(Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY)
USA TODAY - Health care inflation has reached a 50-year low - and with even more fundamental forces than Obamacare at work, the slowdown is likely to persist for several years.
Some reasons are familiar, like the slowdown in prescription drug spending following expiration of patents on blockbuster drugs, exposing brand-name medicines such as cholesterol remedy Lipitor to generic competition.
Medical device prices are also rising more slowly than inflation, as Advanced Medical Device Association senior executive vice president David Nexon says stiff competition and cost-cutting by hospitals is taking away manufacturers' pricing power. And consumers appear to be buying care more carefully because of insurance changes that boost co-payments and deductibles, according to researchers at Harvard and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Most of all, hospital cost gains are slowing down. Reasons include ACA-related changes in Medicare policies cutting reimbursements by $17 billion, according to a Nov. 20 report from the White House. Over time, hospital cost growth is likely to be held down by a shift toward outpatient care and a drive by hospitals to better coordinate care, said Caroline Steinberg, vice president of trend analysis for the American Hospital Association.
"We, collectively, slowed health care spending,'' said Michael Chernew, an economist who is professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. "Whether we cut spending more is more of a policy choice than a pre-determined outcome.'"
Overall health care spending will rise faster in the next few years than in the last few, as tens of millions of previously uninsured people get covered under the new law, he added. But inflation in medical prices has dropped steadily since the recession, reaching an annual rate of 1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the last 12 months, the price of prescription drugs and medical devices rose 0.5% and 0.7%, the price of doctors' services rose 1.4% and prices for hospital and related services rose 4.9%, the BLS says.
The Obama administration claims the ACA is driving the largest part of the changes, citing research by Chernew and others. Republican skeptics have pointed to studies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Kaiser Foundation that blame the lingering effects of the recession. Both Kaiser and Chernew agree that part of the slower inflation is due to patients' cutting back as they bear more of the costs and is likely to be permanent. The biggest part of health care spending is hospital care and hospitals are holding down costs in several key ways, said Steinberg.
One is by shifting more patients to outpatient settings. The hospital chain Tenet Healthcare said inpatient admissions dropped 2.6% in the third quarter while outpatient admissions rose 3.5%. For the first nine months of this year, Tenet said inpatient revenue dropped 1.6% while outpatient revenue climbed 6.6%.
Another is a slow-moving change in reimbursement models, by both Medicare and private insurers, to demand better-integrated care and higher quality that heads off complications and readmissions.
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Medicare & Medicaid News
Medicare, Other Health Care Spending Slowing but Cost Controls Must Be Implemented
New England Journal of Medicine study finds health spending rose just 0.8% per person in 2012, Affordable Care Act measures to control costs may be contributing to biggest slowdown in decades
Dec. 26, 2013 The growth of health care cost is slowing and at least a portion is due to actions stemming from Obamacare (Affordable Care Act), but regardless of the causes, the U.S. needs to try to control health spending. An analysis, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, also finds that a broad, bipartisan consensus about strategies that will be effective in controlling costs has emerged.
According to a new study by David Blumenthal, M.D., and Kristof Stremikis of The Commonwealth Fund and David Cutler, Ph.D., of Harvard University, health care spending rose only moderately last year for the third year in a row, increasing by 0.8 percent per person, slightly less than the rate of growth of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.
This trend marks a departure from the previous five decades, and may be fueled in part by payment reforms contained within the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
While analysts are divided on whether the new trend is a result of the recession or recent efforts to control spending, the authors of Health Care Spending: A Giant Slain or Sleeping? argue that, either way, the U.S. will need to reengineer health services to make them more efficient - to go after the one-third of health spending that is estimated to be wasteful.
Blumenthal and his coauthors outline the areas of agreement among health policy experts about the actions that are needed to achieve this goal.
Understanding Slower Health Care Cost Growth
Originally posted here:
Medicare, Other Health Care Spending Slowing but Cost Controls Must Be Implemented
By BILL BARROW Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) - Republicans who want to regain control of the Senate will first have to do battle among themselves in 2014 primary elections, due largely to differences over how to proceed against the law they deride as "Obamacare."
In a number of Senate primary campaigns, conservatives are arguing over the best way to oppose President Barack Obama's health care law. The outcome of those campaigns could affect the battle over which party controls the Senate.
In intraparty skirmishes from Georgia to Nebraska, the GOP's most strident candidates and activists are insisting on a no-holds-barred approach. They accuse fellow Republicans - including several incumbent senators - of being too soft in their opposition to the Affordable Care Act and to the president in general.
The struggle will help determine just how conservative the Senate Republican caucus will be during Obama's final two years. And it could influence which party controls the chamber, with Democrats hoping that the most uncompromising Republican standard-bearers will emerge from the primaries and fare as poorly in general elections as their counterparts did in several 2012 Senate races. Republicans need to gain six seats to retake the majority in the Senate.
Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who wants to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, stepped into the dispute recently when he seemed to scold much of his party during an interview on a conservative talk radio show.
"A lot of conservatives say, 'Nah, just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own," Kingston said. "Well, I don't think that's always the responsible thing to do."
Rep. Paul Broun, one of Kingston's rivals in a crowded primary field, pounced immediately, declaring in an Internet ad, "I don't want to fix Obamacare, I want to get rid of it." Conservative commentators hammered Kingston with headlines like "Kingston has surrendered on Obamacare."
In Tennessee, state Rep. Joe Carr blasted Sen. Lamar Alexander for serving as a key GOP negotiator in the deal to end the partial government shutdown that resulted from House Republicans' efforts to deny funding for the health care law. Alexander subsequently described himself as a "conservative problem solver," a characterization that Carr says "typifies how out of touch he is."
Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin is using a similar line of attack in trying to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as is Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel in his primary challenge to Sen. Thad Cochran. Carr, Bevin and McDaniel all say they'd be more like freshmen Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas, tea party favorites who pushed the defunding strategy and vexed their longer-serving colleagues.
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Citing the federal Affordable Care Act, national food-service provider Sodexo is cutting health care benefits for more than 30 of its Spokane-areaworkers.
The national company, which has more than 120,000 workers nationwide at hospitals, colleges, military bases, clinics, nursing facilities and other locations, has roughly 270 workers inSpokane.
Sodexos changes are part of a national reaction by large and small companies to the new federal law. The Affordable Care Act lets companies redefine which workers receive medical insurance, a costly benefit that it can now reduce by shifting workers to newly created private healthplans.
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Sodexos full-time areaemployees:
188 now, 111 inJanuary.
Sodexos part-time areaemployees:
83 now, 144 inJanuary.
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Sodexo cutting health care benefits by reclassifying workers - Thu, 26 Dec 2013 PST
By BILL BARROW Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) - Republicans see the 2014 midterm elections as a chance to capitalize on voter frustration with the problem-plagued health care overhaul, but the GOP first must settle a slate of Senate primaries where conservatives are arguing over the best way to oppose President Barack Obama's signature law.
In intraparty skirmishes from Georgia to Nebraska, the GOP's most strident candidates and activists are insisting on a no-holds-barred approach. They accuse fellow Republicans - including several incumbent senators - of being too soft in their opposition to the Affordable Care Act and to the president in general.
The outcomes will help determine just how conservative the Senate Republican caucus will be during Obama's final two years. And they could influence which party controls the chamber, with Democrats hoping that the most uncompromising Republican standard-bearers will emerge from the primaries and fare as poorly in general elections as their counterparts did in several 2012 Senate races. Republicans need to gain six seats for a majority.
Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who wants to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, stepped into the rift recently when he seemed to scold much of his party during an interview on a conservative talk radio show.
"A lot of conservatives say, 'Nah, just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own," Kingston said. "Well, I don't think that's always the responsible thing to do."
Rep. Paul Broun, one of Kingston's rivals in a crowded primary field, pounced immediately, declaring in an Internet ad, "I don't want to fix Obamacare, I want to get rid of it." Conservative commentators hammered Kingston with headlines like "Kingston has surrendered on Obamacare."
In Tennessee, state Rep. Joe Carr blasted Sen. Lamar Alexander for serving as a key GOP negotiator in the deal to end the partial government shutdown that resulted from House Republicans' efforts to deny funding for the health care law. Alexander subsequently described himself as a "conservative problem solver," a characterization that Carr says "typifies how out of touch he is."
Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin is using a similar line of attack in trying to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as is Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel in his primary challenge to Sen. Thad Cochran. Carr, Bevin and McDaniel all say they'd be more like freshmen Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas, tea party favorites who pushed the defunding strategy and vexed their longer-serving colleagues.
In Nebraska and Louisiana, Republican candidates who say they oppose the health care law have had to defend their past positions on health care.
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Health care divides some Republican Senate rivals - NBC40.net