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Prompted by recent healthcare and immigration reform debates, an investigation of healthcare spending from 1999 to 2006 found that the cost of providing healthcare to immigrants is lower than the cost of providing care to U.S. natives and that immigrants are not contributing disproportionately to high healthcare costs in public programs, including Medicaid, according to a study published online Feb. 11 in Health Affairs.
While the U.S. healthcare reform debate battles on, one issue emerging at the forefront is whether a reform package should include medical liability system reform--an oft-cited whipping boy for rising healthcare costs, according to a perspective published online June 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 2010, growth in national health expenditures is projected to decelerate to 4.6 percent, down from 5.5 in 2009, due to a projected decline in Medicare spending growth as a result of a 21 percent cut to Medicare physician payment rates, according to a healthcare spending projection report issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), prepared by CMS's Office of the Actuary and published online in Health Affairs.
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The greatest threat to the U.S. budget stability in the coming decade is the growth of federal spending on healthcare, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found that spending for Medicare and Medicaid, under current law, is expected to keep growing faster than the economy, reaching 6.6 percent of the gross domestic product by 2020 and potentially reaching 10 percent by 2035.
Healthcare providers representing hospitals, health-insurance companies, doctors, drug makers and medical-device makers on Monday pledged their commitment to President Barack Obama to reduce cost increases in the U.S. healthcare system by $2 trillion over the next decade.
U.S. healthcare spending grew 6.1 percent in 2007 to $2.2 trillion, or $7,421 per person, which was the slowest rate of growth since 1998, and 0.6 of a percentage point lower than the growth of 6.7 percent in 2006, according to a report by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
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The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.