Medicare

See the following -

Fifth Time A Charm For Telehealth Bill?

Erin McCann | Government Health IT | March 21, 2013

A telemedicine bill aimed at expanding remote patient monitoring technology in rural and underserved communities was re-introduced in the Senate this week, making it the fifth time the bill has been proposed since 2005. Read More »

Finding The Value In HIE, IT Integration Will Push Adoption: Q&A

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | May 9, 2013

“What’s in it for me?” isn’t an unreasonable question when it comes to healthcare information technology.  Providers are being asked to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new IT systems, and finding the business case for these massive investments is crucial to spurring adoption and improving healthcare at its core. Read More »

For Medicare, Immigrants Offer Surplus, Study Finds

Sabrina Tavernise | New York Times | May 29, 2013

Immigrants have contributed billions of dollars more to Medicare in recent years than the program has paid out on their behalf, according to a new study, a pattern that goes against the notion that immigrants are a drain on federal health care spending. Read More »

GAO Finds That 16 Percent of Eligible Hospitals Received EHR Incentives

Bernie Monegain | Government Health IT | July 27, 2012

More than two-thirds of the hospitals that received Medicare EHR incentive payments for 2011 are in urban areas, according to a new GAO report, which slices and dices who received how much, when, and where. Read More »

GAO Follows The EHR Incentive Money Trail

Diana Manos | Government Health IT | December 20, 2012

A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows the median Medicaid EHR incentive payment received by hospitals in 2011 was $613,512. Read More »

General Dynamics Closes $960M Vangent Acquisition

Nick Wakeman | Washington Technology | September 30, 2011

General Dynamics Corp. has closed its $960 million acquisition of Vangent Inc. in a move that builds out GD’s health care IT business. The company becomes part of General Dynamics IT and creates a health care business that stretches across both civilian and defense agencies. Read More »

Generic Drugs Don't Necessarily Mean Low Prices

Megan Thompson | PBS Newshour | November 2, 2013

NewsHour Weekend's Megan Thompson reports on the surprising disparity in pricing for generic drugs. Generics, generally thought to be cheap, can actually vary widely in price from pharmacy to pharmacy, causing some to skip medications altogether. Read More »

Geraldo Rivera Supports Single Payer

Don McCanne | Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) | November 6, 2013

[...] Geraldo Rivera was quite sincere when, on his radio show, he discussed briefly the serious flaws of Obamacare and then explicitly supported single payer – Medicare for everybody. This is from a Republican who also has a show (“Geraldo-at-Large”) on the Fox News Channel. Read More »

Goal of NYU-Continuum Hospital Mega-Merger: Raising Prices

Avik Roy | Forbes | June 8, 2012

On Wednesday, two big New York City hospital chains—New York University’s Langone Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners—announced that they were looking into merging into one mega-entity...There is only one reason why these two hospital chains are linking arms: to force insurers and patients to accept higher prices for their services. Read More »

Google Cloud Shut Down This Guy's Business — But Now He's a Fan for Life

Julie Bort | Business Insider | August 26, 2016

On Monday, Fred Trotter, CEO of a healthcare startup called DocGraph, came into work only to discover that his cloud computing provider, Google, had effectively shut down his company, sending him and his team into a panic. DocGraph, through its sister company, CareSet, sells Medicare data and analysis to help improve patient care and track the effectiveness of drugs. It not only stores its data with Google, but also relies on Google's machine learning service, Tensorflow, to help it with the analysis...

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Grading the Public Options That Already Exist

Sabrina Shankman | Pro Publica | October 28, 2009

Pundits and politicians from both sides of the fence have been hollering themselves blue about a potential public health care option. Instead of relying on private insurers, the government would insure people itself...Two of the three health care reform bills in Congress have a public option. What might a public option look like in practice? One way to find out is to look at what's already out there. Read More »

Graph of the Day: Over-the-Top Health Costs

Aaron Sinner | Daily Planet | January 13, 2012

Today’s graph comes from National Geographic and shows just how far out of whack the U.S. health system is compared to other nations. Despite spending significantly more than any other developed country and lacking a universal health care system (which the blue-line countries have), we still rank in the bottom half in average life expectancy.

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Greed, Fear And Other Barriers To Health Care As A Human Right

Philip Caper | Bangor Daily News | April 18, 2013

Of all the wealthy countries, only the United States has so far failed to treat health care as a human right. A human right to health care means that everybody receives the same health care whatever their age, gender, health or employment status, racial or religious background, sexual orientation, or wealth and income level. Read More »

Hacking Health Care Records Reaches Epidemic Proportions

Nsikan Akpan | Scientific American | March 29, 2016

In February 2015, Anthem made history when 78.8 million of its customers were hacked. It was the largest health care breach ever, and it opened the floodgates on a landmark year. More than 113 million medical records were compromised last year, according to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Health and Human Services. Consider it this way: if each case represented a single individual, one in three Americans would have been a victim...

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Halamka's Next Steps for the National Healthcare IT agenda

At HIMSS, I listened carefully to payers, providers, patients, developers, and researchers. Below is a distillation of what I heard from thousands of stakeholders. It is not partisan and does not criticize the work of any person in industry, government or academia. It reflects the lessons learned from the past 20 years of healthcare IT implementation and policymaking. Knowing where we are now and where we want to be, here are 10 guiding principles.