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As states look at how to provide high-quality, affordable care to Medicaid beneficiaries, more are turning to Medicaid managed care for the care coordination and support Medicaid health plans provide for millions. Nearly two-thirds of all...
After a dozen years of flat funding, the National Institutes of Health has become a top target on Capitol Hill — not for less money but more, potentially billions more by 2020. It’s a remarkable turnaround for the huge medical research...
Streamlining the continuity of care among Medicare patients could save the United States hundreds of billions of dollars a year, TheStreet.com has reported. That's the conclusion of a Johns Hopkins University study published in the July...
In the years leading up to 2009, Intel tried a number of popular approaches to tame its soaring health care costs. To encourage employees and their families to be more involved in the purchase of their care and aware of its actual cost,...
Primary care physicians avoided another potential payment cut when the House and Senate agreed to remove a proposed Medicare pay reduction from trade legislation that recently became law. The law, the Trade Preferences Extension Act,...
Pay-for-performance programs first appeared on the health care landscape more than decade ago, and ever since then, stakeholders have been struggling with how to best reward health care professionals for their good work. Are physicians and...
The nation’s five largest health insurance companies are circling one another like hungry lions closing in on prey. On Friday, Aetna said it would acquire its smaller rival Humana to create a company with combined revenues of $115 billion...
The politics of end-of-life care are beginning to disappear in Washington six years after Tea Party darling Sarah Palin injected false claims that Congressional health reform legislation included “death panels.” Bipartisan legislation...
Beginning in 2017, the Affordable Care Act gives Minnesota and other states remarkable freedom to dramatically overhaul the law through “innovation waivers” to customize health reform to their citizens’ needs. One of the first questions...
In the world of healthcare delivery system reform, Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins University is a rock star. His pioneering work in reengineering hospital processes that lead to unnecessary infections has been credited with...
Following weeks of speculation, Aetna (AET) made it official this morning, agreeing to buy rival Humana (HUM) for $37 billion as merger-mania sweeps the health insurance industry. For now, the deal appears to put the two insurers into the...
Gynecologists ordered fewer preventive services for women who were insured by Medicaid than for those with private coverage, a recent study found. The study by researchers at the Urban Institute examined how office-based primary care...
Ever since James L. Holly, MD, began practicing family medicine in 1975, dictation and transcription frustrated him as a means of recording what transpired during patient visits. In 1998, two years after forming a group practice, he...
Current approaches to managing behavioral health benefits and reimbursement create challenges for effective care coordination, according to a new report from the Massachusetts attorney general's office. The AG set out to examine how...
Addressing behavioral health issues in the primary care setting makes sense, and it's time for stakeholders to address and eliminate barriers to integrating mental health and physical health for the sake of patients, the American College...
As HCI reported on June 25, “The [U.S.] House Appropriations Committee voted in favor of a bill that would eliminate the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Health Research and Quality, a research agency that has long...
Access to care remains a problem in the U.S because scheduling is based on providers' convenience, and practices fail to properly use nurse practitioners and physician assistants, according to an Institute of Medicine report. The report,...
Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in King v Burwell, which upholds health insurance subsidies for all eligible Americans regardless of where they live, virtually ends with the sentence quoted in the title of this essay. It is a...
Unequal health care continues to be a serious problem for black Americans. More than a decade after the Institute of Medicine issued a landmark report showing that minority patients were less likely to receive the same quality health care...
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case next term on whether a self-funded insurer should have to turn over certain information to the state of Vermont—a case that could have far-reaching implications. The court announced Monday that it...

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