Software Helps Insurers Profit from Denials
For the past couple years, Martin Jensen has been sounding an alarm, shouting to doctors and hospitals about the biggest danger they probably don’t know about. As an independent information technology...
View ArticleSocial Security Update
The trustees, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, reported that Medicare is in far worse shape than Social Security. The Medicare reserve fund is expected to be exhausted later this year, and it...
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Boom Without End
The mass retirement of the baby boom generation is fast approaching, and it seems like a looming nightmare: 76 million Americans transformed overnight into legions of the elderly, swathed in robes and...
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Evidence of a Need for Change
High cost is the high-profile villain of American health care, and fall is the season when it sashays onto center stage. It is the time of year when employers and Medicare make annual announcements of...
View ArticleSeniors: How Taxed Are They?
The growing presence of older people in American political and economic life has been one of the major developments of the past half-century. With the leading edge of the baby boomers about to enter...
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Cutting Medicare Costs for Complex Patients
For all the political chatter about fraud, waste and abuse, one big reason that Medicare costs so much is that old people get sick. And the relatively small group of patients, those with four or five...
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Comparative Effectiveness Research Cornered by Foes
That’s how much the 2009 stimulus bill — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — devoted to this type of research, which aims to produce better information about the costs and benefits of...
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What Does a U.S. Government Shutdown Mean?
The federal government has been coy, even with its own employees, about exactly what a government shutdown would look like — who’d have to work and who wouldn’t, which services would be considered...
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Obesity — Not Aging — Balloons Health Care Costs
“I guess I don’t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.” — Peter Gabriel Our rising life expectancy has been nice for those who like being alive, but it seems a bummer for society as a...
View ArticleMedicare: Good! Government: Bad!
I’ve always wondered about those enraged seniors who purportedly shouted “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!”—an anecdote repeated endlessly during, and after, the 2010 midterm election. No...
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Are We Really Getting Sicker as We Age?
Americans are living longer—which means we’re all going to be stuck with ever-increasing medical bills for the growing ranks of the elderly, right? Though many analysts think so, a new study says that...
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How Many Die From Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals?
It seems that every time researchers estimate how often a medical mistake contributes to a hospital patient's death, the numbers come out worse. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous...
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Medicare Fraud Remains Rampant, Audacious
Last week, the Department of Justice announced the sentencing of one of many Medicare fraud perpetrators—this time, former Los Angeles pastor Charles Agbu, 58. Agbu owned a medical equipment supply...
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Why Are So Many Elderly Patients in Miami Being Treated for Dementia?
Elderly Americans are prescribed medications in inexplicably different ways depending on where they live, according to a new report from Dartmouth researchers. The most depressed older patients—or at...
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5 Health-Care Reporters on Their Personal Brushes With the Medical System
Earlier this year, I wrote about how my mom's death changed my perspective about end-of-life care. After watching her final days, I no longer felt so certain that society should pressure families to...
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Are You Overpaying for Name-Brand Drugs When Generics Would Be Just as...
We talked to dozens of experts for our report on how Medicare is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by failing to look into doctors who disproportionately prescribe name-brand drugs. They...
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How Medicare’s Failure to Track Doctors Wastes Billions on Name-Brand Drugs
Medicare is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by failing to rein in doctors who routinely give patients pricey name-brand drugs when cheaper generic alternatives are available. ProPublica...
View ArticleCaught Up in a Medicare Drug Fraud
At another time in her life, Denise Heap might have tossed aside the insurance forms listing the drugs prescribed to her mother. The “explanation of benefits” forms came like clockwork and didn’t...
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‘Let the Crime Spree Begin’: How Fraud Flourishes in Medicare’s Drug Plan
With just a handful of prescriptions to his name, psychiatrist Ernest Bagner III was barely a blip in Medicare’s vast drug program in 2009. But the next year he began churning them out at a furious...
View ArticleFraud Rx: Medicare Makes Moves to Tighten Oversight of Dirty Doctors
Ten years after Medicare’s vaunted prescription drug program was signed into law, the Obama administration and Congress are re-evaluating whether it does enough to stop inappropriate prescribing and...
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