Myth vs. Fact: Health Care Reform in Massachusetts
The State Model for the Affordable Care Act Is Working and Broadly Popular
What ‘Big Medicine’ Means for Doctors and Patients
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.A colleague described a recent meeting at his hospital by saying that five years ago, most of the physicians in the room had been like him, independent owners of small group practices. Now a majority were employees of the hospital.
“I’m a dying breed,” he said, “and it’s getting harder to survive.” The doctors in his own group had just spent months wrangling over their hospital contract, installing an electronic medical record system and scrambling to fill the void in their on-call schedule left by a colleague who went to work for another hospital.
“What’s not to like about working for a hospital,” he asked wearily, “when you can have better hours, a guaranteed salary and no practice management hassles?”
A shift toward smaller health insurance networks
Thousands of employers in California and nationwide are opting for 'narrow network' HMOs, which offer notable savings on insurance premiums but also offer fewer medical providers.
By Duke Helfand
3:13 AM PDT, April 3, 2011
Death panels version 2.1?
The deficit-reduction plan that President Obama announcedWednesday seeks to increase Medicare savings in part through a new "Partnership for Patients" that tries to reduce the illnesses that patients contract while hospitalized or undergoing surgery. It also tries to speed up the availability of generic biologic medicines and have Medicare seek lower prices for certain patients' prescription drugs. Those proposals are either noncontroversial or controversial only in the pharmaceutical industry.
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