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One-third of U.S. employers plan to move their workers’ health-care coverage to a private exchange in the next few years, a survey found, following the le

Health spending in the U.S. is expected to increase more than 6 percent this year and 6.2 percent annually from 2015-2022 as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act takes full effect and millions of Americans gain insurance, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Under Obamacare, companies that don’t offer coverage for their employees will be fined $2,000 per employee. Employers spend $6,000 per employee on average, so d

The current system, researchers say, financially encourages doctors to do more procedures and is one of the reasons health costs have escalated. The health law required Medicare to gradually factor in quality into payments for hospitals, nursing homes, physicians and most medical providers.

Medicare had already decided that large physician groups -- those with 100 or more doctors, nurses, social workers or other health professionals -- will gain or lose as much as 1 percent of their pay starting in 2015. Those incentives would double to 2 percent the following year under draft regulations Medicare released this month. The proposal also would phase mid-sized physicians groups—those with between 10 and 99 health professionals—into the program in 2016 instead of in 2017. While they would be eligible for bonuses up to 2 percent, they would be shielded from any penalties for that first year.

The law provided the ONC with $2 billion to support development of a nationwide electronic health information system. Th

On the positive side, providers are clearly aware of and responding to the availability of incentives. Internal CMS surveys show that as of April 2011, 78% of physicians and 96% of hospital executives were aware of the meaningful-use program (Trudel K: personal communication). As Figure 1Figure 1Provider Registrations for Meaningful-Use Payments. shows, more than 114,000 eligible providers, or 21%, had registered for meaningful-use payments by the end of September 2011.11