The health insurance marketplaces offer consumers a multitude of options, but sorting out which plan bests suit their needs can be a slog. That’s especially true when it comes to figuring out whether a particular doctor is part of a plan’s network, since the directories are famously unreliable.
Notions of personal failure and our collective ignorance of what it’s like to live on $8.60 a day help explain why 20 states have not covered the very poorest, and why Medicaid as we know it could disappear.
As we pass the two-year mark on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, journalists are still asking a lot of questions about just how well health reform is working when it comes to expanding coverage. Data journalist Meghan Hoyer shows data fellows how to interrogate the data.
California says the expense of new hep C drugs has nothing to do with who is prescribed them. But the question lingers: With some 200,000 people living with hep C in Medi-Cal, how much of a factor is cost in determining which patients receive treatment?
New hepatitis C treatments are both staggeringly effective and expensive. This has sparked a nationwide discussion about the high cost of specialty drugs and how such costs are keeping patients from needed treatments. Prescribing data may offer new insights.
Nevada is serving a greater number of mentally ill children in recent years. “This is an epidemic,” said Dr. Jay Fisher. Decades ago, he said, physicians looked to vaccines to preventing epidemics. “This is going to be much more difficult to solve. It’s a 12-headed beast.”
The rising prevalence of "narrow" health insurance networks has set off alarms. But do such networks keep patients from getting good care? Not necessarily. The more relevant question is whether a provider network is adequate or not.
More and more, doctors like are looking to parents to help make difficult decisions on how much treatment to give babies born very sick and premature, as well as figuring out when it's time to let them go. There's now more emphasis on parents' values and preferences in such cases.
Anne and Omar Shamiyeh first learned something was wrong with one of their twins during an ultrasound, when Anne was 18 weeks pregnant. "The technician was, like, 'Well, there's no visualization of his stomach,'" Anne recounted. "And I was like, 'How does our baby have no stomach?'"
“Out-of-network” means “bad idea.” Right? Yet many patients do willingly choose out-of-network doctors for medical care, whether it's for a complex surgery or for managing their diabetes. Going out-of-network isn't for everyone, but it can have benefits for those who make a fully informed choice.
