It’s a pretty safe bet that you’d be happy if someone agreed to pay you more to do the same thing you’ve already been doing.So, surely primary care doctors can appreciate one provision of the federal health reform law that bumps Medicaid rates for primary care up to the same level as Medicare rates, right? [...]

What’s in a name? Everything, it would appear, when it comes to describing Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, which the Republican-controlled House of Representatives backed in its budget resolution late last month. The plan would subsidize seniors’ purchase of private insurance plans instead of enrolling in traditional government-financed Medicare, although that would be [...]

Health care spending over the last two years has slowed to levels not seen since the mid-1990s. The conventional wisdom is that it reflected the recession-related reductionsin demand by people who lost jobs and their health care coverage.That could not have affected Medicare’s nearly 50 million beneficiaries, most of whom are retired. Yet Medicare spending [...]

The federal government has deemed a pilot Medicare competitive bidding program for durable medical equipment like wheelchairs and diabetes supplies a success and plans to expand it.The pilot, which was rolled out in nine cities that included Cleveland, Dallas and Pittsburgh, saved consumers in those cities $200 million on medical supplies through lower prices and [...]

A pilot project from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation will funnel extra cash to primary care practices from both the federal government and private insurers.The federal government has selected seven regions across the nation to participate in the pilot program, including the Cincinnati and Dayton area in Southern Ohio. Officials with Cincinnati’s The [...]

I’mexcitedthat four of the most conservative Senators are offering a serious plan to reform Medicare. They would end fee for service Medicare in 2014, place everyone in the plan currently offered to federal employees, increase the eligibility age and apply means testing. Here’s what I like about it:The plan is mainly focused on facing up [...]

Okay, readers, how many of you desire to have a feeding tube inserted into your belly one day? Some of you? A few of you? All of you? Not me, that’s for sure. So, if there comes a time when I cannot speak for myself, let this blog post serve as a statement of my [...]

Once the general election rolls around, Mitt Romney is going to have a big healthcare problem on his hands. And it’s not his passage of RomneyCare while governor of Massachusetts.Yes, he’s getting pilloried now by GOP rivals over RomneyCare. Yes, everyone who’s been paying attention knows that RomneyCare is nearly identical to ObamaCare, which conservatives [...]

An English company says it will begin selling a disposable, portable DNA-reading device by the end of the year. Oxford Nanopore Technologies’s product sequences DNA by reading the chemical bases in a DNA molecule directly. They plan to sell the smaller version for $900.The government may not be dramatically less efficient than private enterprise, at [...]

Mitt “Two Cadillacs” Romney in his Detroit speech on Friday said he’d like to raise the age on Medicare eligibility to 67 to save the taxpayers money. A Congressional Budget Office report released last month found raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 from 65 would reduce Medicare spending by $148 billion over the next [...]