Selected stories from the daily newsletter CQ HealthBeat from the week of May 9, 2011. Provided as a service under rights licensed by The Commonwealth Fund. The full-text version of this newsletter is available in the
newsletter archive.
Witnesses at an afternoon hearing registered varying degrees of disapproval with the current Medicare fee-for-service physician payment system and urged a House subcommittee to consider such alternatives as five-year, per-patient global budgets and "capitation" under which providers get a fixed, per-patient sum over a span of time regardless of the amount of care a patient gets. Read more »
Women are not only struggling to afford health insurance, but nearly half of them don't go to the doctor when they are sick, according to the results of a new Commonwealth Fund survey. Read more »
Tens of millions of Americans would be thrown off Medicaid if the House-passed budget plan to convert the program to a block grant became law and the health care overhaul was repealed. But how many would be cut from the plan for the poor and disabled would vary greatly depending on the state, according to a new report released by the Kaiser Family Foundation's Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Read more »
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius acknowledged that a high-profile proposed rule on Medicare accountable care organizations is drawing intense criticism among health care providers who say it needs substantial revision. Read more »
The Medicare trust fund will run out of money by 2024, five years sooner than projected a year ago, according to the annual report released by the program's trustees. Read more »
The percentage of young adults going without health insurance took a big drop, according to a recently released Gallup poll. Read more »