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NYT: Critics of Health Care Law Prepare to Battle Over Insurance Exchange Subsidies
Critics of the new health care law, having lost one battle in the Supreme Court, are mounting a challenge to President Obama’s interpretation of another important provision, under which the federal government will subsidize health insurance for millions of low- and middle-income people.
Starting in 2014, the law requires most Americans to have health insurance. It also offers subsidies to help people pay for insurance bought through markets known as insurance exchanges.
At issue is whether the subsidies will be available in exchanges set up and run by the federal government in states that fail or refuse to establish their own exchanges.
See on www.nytimes.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
Physicians Need to Use Social Media in Their Practices
Who purchases a product or a service without first checking the vendor’s website and consumer reviews? Patients do the same with their physicians.
The social media revolution is here to stay. Not only is there no place to hide, no one in business can afford to hide. As Eric Qualman puts it, “We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
It’s easy to badmouth the use of social media in professional settings, because many see Facebook and Twitter and YouTube as only about posting what restaurant or concert a person is at or the latest video or photo about someone’s new kitten. However, for physicians, there are good professional reasons to use social media.
Fundamentally, the use of social media is all about better communication with patients and improving their health by giving them tools to take an interest in and more control over their health care decisions. And the use of social media is also very much about business by giving physicians the tools to compete more effectively because they communicate better. It is about improving a physician’s practice.
Dr. Kevin Pho is a leading practitioner in (and advocate for) the use of social media by physicians. His blog, KevinMD.com, provides great insight in the effective use of social media to educate and inform.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization understand the power of social media to alert many people at once about health care issues.
Incorporating social media into a physician practice is not easy nor does it happen overnight. There are many legal and practical issues — patient privacy, copyright laws, designating the practice’s social media “leader” and giving that person enough time to communicate, training employees and informing patients, etc. The AMA has adopted policies relating to the use of social media in professional settings, as has the Federation of State Medical Boards.
Getting a consultant who understand the intricacies of healthcare and social media and the practice’s IT system can be very helpful to having a good social media presence.
And regardless of whether a physician practice decides to use social media, it must monitor social media to see what is being said about it, and it must adopt a social media policy for its employees to make sure that their social media behavior does not harm the practice (but there are issues to be dealt with on what an employer can and cannot do).
People of all ages are using social media for many personal and business reasons. Moving in the same direction (if not at the same speed) as one’s patients is critical, and waiting is rarely a good option.
WSJ Blog: Medicare Tries to Cut the Cost of Complex Patients
Medicare is trying new tactics to cut costs for complex patients and keep them healthier, although some health-policy observers say they don’t go far enough.
Under the 2010 health overhaul law, the agency is giving health-care providers incentives to band together and coordinate care for groups of patients. If their costs fall by a great enough percentage, the providers get to pocket some of the savings.
Another part of the law will allow Medicare to impose financial penalties on hospitals that readmit high numbers of patients within 30 days of discharge. Readmissions like these often signal a preventable post-hospital complication. Federal officials are working to help hospitals reduce infections and other ailments that patients acquire inside hospitals by 40% over a three-year period under a piece of the law.
“Better quality care with fewer complications is actually less expensive,” says Paul McGann, a deputy chief medical officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services innovation center.
Past efforts by Medicare to coordinate care have yielded little, if any, savings. A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this year found that Medicare paid 34 programs over a decade to coordinate care or provide disease management. The efforts, on average, had no effect on Medicare expenditures or hospital admissions, the report found.
PAMF Doctor Researching Patient-Centered Care – San Jose Mercury News
Research by Dr. Dominick Frosch of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation is expected to benefit patients in Santa Cruz County. Frosch’s pilot project is one of 50 funded for two years by the nonprofit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which allocated $30 million in April. Frosch was awarded $674,264. He is testing whether empowering patients to ask three key questions will result in patients learning about all the options available and the potential outcomes.
The 3 questions are:
• Given my personal characteristics, conditions and preferences, what should I expect will happen to me?
• What are my options and what are the benefits and harms of those options?
• What can I do to improve the outcomes that are most important to me?
According to Frosch, patients are frequently not informed by their health care providers of the full range of interventions, and patients are often reluctant to speak up because they fear being perceived as “difficult” and getting lower quality care.
A Guide to the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act Decision – Kaiser Family Foundation
There really is no excuse not to be well informed about the most significant legislation and the most important Supreme Court decision in many years.
This policy brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation describes the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act and discusses the implementation of health reform now that questions about the constitutionality of the law have been resolved.
See on www.kff.org
Our Health Policy Matters: Public Health, Mental Health, and Health Policy in a Post-ACA World
Now that the ACA decision is behind us, what’s on the horizon in the world of public health, mental health, and health policy? The truth is that ACA was essentially neutral with respect to prevention and public health. 3% of our nation’s health funding went to these services last year, and 3% will continue to go to these services with or without ACA. That won’t stop the assault on public health. Federal, state, and local governments have all cut public health services in recent years and, unless we have a public health crisis, may well cut further.
See on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation
Hot Topics in Health Care Law — Saturday July 7, 2012
Today’s edition of Hot Topics in Health Care Law is available. This topic aggregator/newspaper contains articles that I think are on the cutting edge of health law.
Baton Rouge Advocate: Millions in cuts slated for Medicaid
The Jindal administration is preparing to roll out about $860 million in cuts to the government’s insurance program that delivers health care to Louisiana’s poor — the result of newly authorized federal Medicaid funding reductions critics call disastrous.
Major health care providers said Friday they are preparing for something they know cannot be good for them or the poor, elderly and disabled once the funds are stripped from the $7.7 billion Medicaid program.
One association that provides community services to the developmentally disabled is already calling for a special legislative session to generate revenues to offset more cuts in the fiscal year that began Sunday.
Another association executive wondered whether the state could still have a viable program that meets federal Medicaid “access to care” requirements.
See on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation
90 Percent of Patients Want to Self-Manage Health Online: Accenture Survey – Health Care IT – News & Reviews
Patients want to access health information online and fill prescriptions electronically. But they also want face-to-face time with their doctor, a survey by Accenture revealed.
California physicians sue Aetna over out-of-network referrals
The California Medical Assn., the largest physician group in the state, and more than 60 individual doctors sued health insurance giant Aetna Inc. The suit against Aetna is part of a growing legal battle over what patients are charged when they go outside a health insurer’s network.
See on www.latimes.com
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