High cost-sharing and expenses not covered by insurance leave some people with expensive medical bills. But costs are not the only barriers to health care access. According to KFF’s new analysis, many adults can face logistical barriers to care, like work schedules or finding a doctor in network or appointment. In 2022, about 1 in…More
Without knowledge of the exact amount providers billed and middlemen charged in fees, OPM can’t fix payment discrepancies. The post Why the Office of Personnel Management Needs Access to Government Employee Health Plan Claims Data appeared first on MedCity News.
Federal law requires that all nonprofit hospitals have financial assistance policies — also known as “charity care” — to reduce or expunge people’s medical bills. New research from Dollar For, an organization dedicated to helping people get access to charity care, suggests that fewer than one-third of people who qualify for charity care actually receive…
The FDA’s recent decision to withhold approval of a new skin cancer treatment fell like a hammer on doctors who treat melanoma and patients who saw that the drug had prolonged the lives of a third of the participants in a clinical trial. “It was devastating news,” said Trisha Wise-Draper, a dermatologist at the University…
Health tech companies made several major funding announcements in May. Here is a list of some of the biggest funding rounds. The post 4 Notable Health Tech Funding Announcements in May appeared first on MedCity News.
When epidemiologist Sophia Newcomer tries to evaluate how well Montana might be able to ward off the measles outbreak spreading across the U.S., she doesn’t have much data to work with. A federal state-by-state survey last year showed that just over 86% of Montana’s 2-year-olds had recently received the measles, mumps, and rubella immunization. That…
By MATTHEW HOLT I was having a fight on Twitter this week and it hit me. America 2024 is Japan 1989. The topic of the fight was right-wing VC Peter Thiel. In 2001 he put a ton of Paypal stock allegedly worth less than $2,000 into a Roth IRA. The Roth IRA was designed so…
By GEORGE HALVORSON Special Needs Plans Change Lives for The Lowest Income and Highest Need Patients The people who benefit the most from Medicare Advantage are clearly the very low-income and high health-need people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid as programs and who enroll as members in the Medicare Advantage Special Needs…
That is according to the 2024 national health expenditure data published in Health Affairs last week (Hartman et al. 2026). Here is the abstract: Health care spending in the US reached $5.3 trillion and increased 7.2 percent in 2024, similar to growth of 7.4 percent in 2023, as increased demand for health care influenced this two-year trend. As…
The question is no longer whether shareback matters. It is whether the healthcare ecosystem is willing to prioritize it in practice by recognizing it in policy measurement, monitoring, and enforcement, as well as investing in the technical and governance structures needed to make shareback routine, high-quality, measurable, and reportable. The post Why Quality Shareback is…