Selected stories from the daily newsletter CQ HealthBeat from the week of September 13, 2010. Provided as a service under rights licensed by The Commonwealth Fund. The full-text version of this newsletter is available in the
Health Reform section of commonwealthfund.org.
The percentage of people living in the United States without health insurance rose to 16.7 percent in 2009, the highest rate since the Census Bureau began collecting data in 1987 and an increase of 1.3 percentage points over 2008 levels. Read more »
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Donald M. Berwick, in his first public address since taking office, urged insurers to become partners with the administration to implement the new health care law. Read more »
Even though many governors are resisting the implementation of the new health care law this year, National Governors Association Executive Director Ray Scheppach predicted that many governors will ultimately want to create their own version of the most significant part of the new system—the exchange markets that will begin in 2014. Read more »
High-quality medical care bears little relationship to publicly available information about physicians, such as their history of malpractice claims or years of experience, according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Read more »
Twenty-seven public health training centers across the country will receive $17 million in funding under grants announced by the Department of Health and Human Services, the first wave of funding under the health care overhaul law to help reverse budget declines for public health programs, advocates say. Read more »
As Congress fights over whether to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts, a group that has backed the health care law released a report last week that characterizes a health tax credit due to go into effect in 2014 as a "huge middle-income tax cut." Read more »