Health-care costs hit the elderly hard, diminish financial wellbeing (USA)

The protection of the savings of the elderly - one of the primary goals of Medicare - is under threat from a combination of spiraling healthcare costs and increased longevity. As the government attempts to reduce Medicare costs, one suggestion is that the elderly could pay a larger proportion of the costs of their healthcare. But exactly how much would this be and what impact would it have on their finances? A new study by Amy Kelley at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and her colleagues, funded by the National Institute on Aging, aims to identify the portion of wealth Medicare beneficiaries spend on healthcare costs in the last five years of life. Their work appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Medicare provides nearly universal health care coverage to the population over 65. However it does not pay for everything. There are co-payments and deductibles, and more importantly, homecare services and non-rehabilitative nursing home care, which are not covered. If proposals suggest the elderly should make even larger contributions to care, it is important to know more about patients' out-of-pocket spending under the current Medicare program

Dead doctors still making millions from Medicare billings (USA)

Medicare issued as much as $92 million in payments between 2000 and 2007 for medical procedures or devices ordered under the names of doctors who had already died, according to a 2008 Senate committee report. Prescriptions written in the names of deceased doctors are only one of the fraudulent techniques that plague the U.S. health care system, which has become a favorite target for organized crime. "There are so many schemes involved," said John Gillies, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "Take any aspect of the healthcare industry and there's a fraud going on in there right now." Medicare and other healthcare fraud have been targeted as major areas for reform by politicians seeking to reduce the country's medical spending. According to the FBI, between 3 and 10 percent of the country's yearly healthcare spending goes to fraud, or $200 billion. This is consistent with an October 2009 Thompson Reuters report, which estimated that fraud cost the U.S. healthcare system more than $220 billion in 2007, or 10 percent of its total spending - Natural News

Rally to put single payer healthcare on the table (USA)

CNA/NNOC Co-president, Geri Jenkins and other healthcare leaders addressed hundreds of nurses, physicians, school employees, clergy, seniors, patients at a rally this week outside a Los Angeles White House Forum on Healthcare Reform to strongly urge a real debate over single-payer/universal healthcare:

New Study: 60 Million People Lack Access to Basic Medical Care (USA)

"The number of people struggling without access to basic health care during these tough economic times has skyrocketed from 56 million to 60 million in just two years, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. A report released by the association today - Primary Care Access: An Essential Building Block of Health Reform - attributes the growth of the 'medically disenfranchised' population to a host of factors that include a worsening shortage of primary care doctors in needy communities and a growing scarcity of providers willing to treat the uninsured or publicly insured. The number of medically disenfranchised grew three times faster than the total U.S. population, a clear sign that that access to primary care is worsening and reaching middle-class American families, even among those who do have insurance. The findings were released today at a briefing with representatives from Community Health Centers around the country, which have received $2 billion in federal help from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to deal with increased demand from the uninsured. With plant closings and job losses mounting from the economic downturn, people who find themselves suddenly uninsured or underinsured are relying more than ever on a place where insurance status doesn't matter - at a Community Health Center"

Pay Now, Benefits May Follow - The Case of Cardiac Computed Tomographic Angiography

"The average American might assume that new medical procedures are proved beneficial before insurers pay for them. In reality, many new procedures are paid for even with no persuasive evidence of benefit. One consequence is health care expenditures that are growing substantially faster than the economy and a Medicare program projected to become insolvent in the next decade. Increased use of technology is the largest driver of this growth; its effect dwarfs that of the aging of our population. We should be able to curb these costs and increase value in health care by taking an evidence-based approach to insurance coverage - but our political environment and medical culture undermine efforts to do so" - more at The New England Journal of Medicine