medical costs

According to a recent poll, one-third of Americans are taking a pass on necessary medical care due to rising costs; even more shocking, this number includes those who have health insurance.... Read more...

> The FTC has sued drugmaker Cephalon of bribing other manufacturers to keep generic forms of narcolepsy drug Provigil off the market. Read more...

A new Colorado measure would raise the state's existing medical malpractice caps, stirring opposition from groups who say that such a measure would increase medical costs and in some cases drive... Read more...

The state of California has launched a Web site which lists what discounts hospitals are willing to offer on care for uninsured patients, or what levels of charity care they offer--as well as... Read more...

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the dominant health insurer in the state, is making a major change in the way it pays its physicians. It's moving from fee-for-service payments to offer... Read more...

No one argues that over the long term, managing diabetes intelligently can cut down on long-term medical costs by stemming hugely expensive complications. The question is, do such management programs pay off over the short term? If not, health plans have little incentive to address the problem, according to one analysis. Article

> Health insurers are jumping into the credit card market, hoping to profit from consumers' need to finance excess medical costs. Article

> CMS has effectively extended the deadline by which providers must have their HIPAA-required National Provider Identifier number. …

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An consumer health advocacy group has concluded that despite having insurance, many Americans face medical costs they cannot afford. A new report by The Access Project suggests that deductibles and co-payments, as well as premiums, are a major source of medical debt for many consumers. Other contributors to medical debt included annual or lifetime benefit caps, out-of-network charges and patient confusion over what they owe. The report's overall conclusions square with another recent …

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> Connecticut HMOs are financially healthy, partly because they're paying out less on medical costs, one analyst says. Article

> The demographics of physicians working in group practices are changing--and this is having a big impact on turnover. Release

> Like many private sector organizations, the Pentagon is arguing that it can't afford its …

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> A new report says that North Carolina is so behind in providing mental health services that it will need more than $500 million for the next five years to meet its obligations. Article

> The Cleveland Clinic is sinking $163 million into its Hillcrest Hospital campus expansion over the next five years, the most it's ever spent on one of its nine community hospitals. …

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