Insurers clearly have not figured out how to profit from the Medicare hospice benefit, which offers comfort care for people who are terminally ill. Caitlin Owens reports for Axios that a government...
Diane Archer
How to keep your teeth strong
Our teeth need our attention, and the mainstream media is letting us know! Knvul Sheikh and Lindsey Bever report for the New York Times and the Washington Post, respectively, on how to brush your...
CVS profits from manufacturing its own generic drugs
CVS has become the sixth largest corporation in America, owning not only a chain of pharmacies, but health insurance company Aetna, and Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM), Caremark, among other big...
Cigna medical directors given little incentive to review prior...
A new Pro Publica report exposes how Cigna requires its medical directors to review prior authorization denials at breakneck speed, preventing patients from getting critical care. One medical...
UnitedHealth care delays, denies and grows ever bigger
At the same time that UnitedHealth is growing its Medicare Advantage business, it is growing many of its other businesses and controlling a sizeable portion of the health care sector, often to the...
What’s happening to our hospitals?
Small independent hospitals are being acquired by large hospital systems across the US or, worse still, they are shutting down. What does that mean for the future of hospitals and for their patients...
Raising Medicare eligibility age could lead to thousands of...
A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Alison Galvani et al. at Yale, finds that raising the Medicare eligibility to 67, as many Republicans are proposing...
Want to live longer? See a doctor who’s female
A new study finds that women live longer when they see female doctors. This study adds to a body of research that finds women and minorities who see female doctors have better health than their...
People with Medicare increasingly going without private...
A new report from the US Census Bureau reveals that an increasing number of people with Medicare are going without private supplemental coverage. While the report does not look into why this is the...
New nursing home staffing requirements are a step forward
It has become increasingly clear that our federal government is not willing or able to enact laws and rules that go as far as necessary to protect consumers. Recently, the Centers for Medicare and...