Have we incentivized electronic checkboxes at the expense of more deliberate, thoughtful ways of practicing medicine? Dr. Monya De suggests that today's focus on efficiency and technology leaves little time for actual doctoring.
Health Insurance and Costs
Jennifer’s experience in Florida’s Medicaid system isn't unique: She waited three months for her son’s appointment and drove 50 miles, only to have the doctor spend five minutes with him, ignore her concerns and tell her to go someplace else.
An unlikely coalition of health insurers, labor and consumer advocates are pushing for controls on high-cost drugs in the nation's most populous state. “California is truly ground zero for this fight,” one advocate said. “It is clear Congress as a whole is not going to take meaningful action."
Malik Stanton is among 2 million children in Florida — about half the state’s under-20 population — who depend on the state’s $24 billion Medicaid program for health care. That same health care system very nearly let him die.
Thousands of babies are born every year in Bexar County, Texas, to mothers who receive no prenatal care. Those women are more likely to give birth prematurely, increasing the odds that their newborns will develop immediate and long-lasting health problems that can be both costly and fatal.
We thought we knew the main reasons why doctors perform too many C-sections in the U.S. But a recently reported study points to another cause: Doctors are often wrong in predicting babies' weight, and that can lead to unnecessary cesareans.
Are insurance policies too complicated to understand? They always have been and always will be unless there are changes in the way policies work, or until there are rules to make it easier for buyers to compare options.
In the past couple of years, the Affordable Care Act has provided thousands of residents at Wyandotte County with health insurance, creating a surge in demand for health care in a county that had already been designated a Health Professional Shortage Area by the federal government.
In pediatric practices across Florida, doctors are struggling to serve patients in the face of paltry reimbursement rates and more intense demands from Medicaid insurance companies.
A complaint filed this week alleges that California is engaging in unlawful discrimination by paying some of the lowest reimbursement rates in the country to the state’s Medicaid providers. As some coverage pointed out, the notion that low rates are limiting access to doctors is “not unfounded."