HLAC Health News

"The movement is across all medical disciplines with 6.8 percent of all physicians planning to stop taking insurance in favor of concierge-style medicine or so-called 'direct primary care.'.... "Already, one in five physicians is restricting the number of Medicare patients in their practice and one in three primary care doctors - the providers on the front lines of keeping the cost of seniors' care low - are restricting Medicare patients.... "Under direct primary care, doctors contract directly with patients to provide all of their primary care needs free of insurance interference at a price generally between $50 and $60 a month per patient. It's what the New York Times last spring called 'concierge for the masses' because it was much cheaper than the historically high cost of concierge medicine some Congressional investigators found to be $5,000 to $15,000 a year or more."

". . . Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee, commonly called the RUC. . . . determines how taxpayers' Medicare dollars are spent, and it sets the relative worth of one physician service versus another. Moreover, because many private insurers and Medicaid programs model their own payments on Medicare's, its fee schedule ends up largely determining physician incomes."

"Our politicians need to take into account the serious - and in some cases profound - health consequences of economic choices," said David Stuckler, a senior researcher at Oxford University and co-author The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. . . . "Ultimately what we show is that worsening health is not an inevitable consequence of economic recessions. It's a political choice. . . ."

". . . over the past six years, several organizations have registered over 800 cases of attempted or achieved 'medical repatriations' - a term used when a hospital deports an injured or sick immigrant to a different medical facility in their home country without their consent."

"Despite the overwhelmingly critical and hostile reaction, this reform to our healthcare system is not poised to wreak the havoc on American small businesses that the opposition is charging."

... patients with complications cost more to treat -- they spend more time in the hospital and require resources like nurses and beds. But the study found that these patients didn't simply cost more to treat, ... the majority of them generated a much larger profit for hospitals.

"... reducing surgical complications could harm hospital financial results...."

Bio-patch measures bioelectrical signals through the skin, gathering data on different parts of the body depending on where it is placed. "On the chest it provides electrocardiography (ECG), on the skull it measures brainwaves (EEC), and on the forearm it can measure muscle response to stimulation from the nervous system (EMG)," he says. It also has a built-in sensor that constantly monitors body temperature. With a wireless connection, the patient can analyse the readings in their smartphone, or send the data via internet to a healthcare professional for diagnosis.

. . . changing parents' attitudes about vaccines may be a matter of influencing the people who are influencing parents in the first place.

A new study found that an overwhelming majority of vaccination "naysayer" parents surveyed were influenced by friends, family and other non-medical peer recommendations when deciding whether or not to vaccinate their child. . . .

The initiative will involve scientists, government agencies and private foundations teaming up to create a detailed map of the brain, which is composed of billions of neurons, or nerve cells. The hope is the findings will lead to a better understanding of brain disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and autism, as well as psychiatric conditions and brain injuries

Link to published study: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3117.html

We had a discussion on this last Friday. Laurie has an entry on it in Public Health. I'm thinking though that there is so much in the news that I need to load it to HWRC pronto