Medicine & Health articles from September 2004

Medicine & Health archives from September 2004

Part B premium for 2005 will rise by 17.4 percent ...(Medicare Premiums)
September 13, 2004... Medicare's Part B beneficiary premium for physician services and other outpatient services will rise by over 17.4 percent--to $78.20 per month--for 2005. As Medicare's actuaries predicted and M&H reported in March, the 17-percent-plus hike...

Bad news on private coverage, good news--for now--on public.(In Medicine & Health Perspectives this week ...)
September 13, 2004... Continuing decline in employment-based health coverage pushed the proportion of uninsured Americans up to 15.6 percent in 2003, the United States Census Bureau reported August 26. The number of Americans with coverage hit an all-time high...

Expect lame-duck session in 2004, Medicare cuts in 2005.(In Congress)
September 13, 2004... Congress will be unable to pass all its fiscal year 2005 appropriations legislation before the November elections and will finish the job in an end-of-year lame-duck session, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) said in a September 8 address to the Academy...

Outreach to kids, HSAs for low-income workers top list.(Bush Health Agenda)
September 13, 2004... The Bush administration's proposed health agenda for a second term would stay the course from Bush II, Term One, focusing heavily on tax credits for coverage, catastrophic health plans with allied personal spending accounts, and new coverage...

Appellate court upholds RICO class for docs.(Managed Care Litigation)
September 13, 2004... Plaintiffs may pursue a class-action lawsuit alleging that the managed care industry conspired to delay and deny payments to the nation's physicians, a three-judge federal panel held unanimously on Sept. 1. In appealing a class-action...

GAO says Scully should return pay over Foster flap.(Medicare Cost Estimates)
September 13, 2004... The federal Department of Health and Human Services had no legal right to use its congressional appropriation to pay former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Tom Scully's salary during the period in 2003 when he prevented...

Clinical trial disclosure proposals come from Journal Editors, legislators, PhRMA.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Momentum is building behind efforts to ensure that the results of clinical trials are disclosed, even if they are unfavorable to the drug being studied. On Sept. 8, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors said that, for...

NIH publishes open-access proposal.(In Other News)(National Institutes of Health)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... A new policy proposed Sept. 3 by the National Institutes of Health would make freely available to the public articles based on research funded wholly or partly by the NIH. Under the proposal, which has a 60-day comment period, grantees...

Australian revisions put Free Trade Agreement in doubt.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... When Australia's parliament approved the United States-Australia Free Trade Agreement last month, lawmakers amended the document to blunt some of the new powers that U.S. negotiators had won for pharmaceutical makers in the Australian...

Reimportation vote not in Senate leader's fall plans.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) said Sept. 8 that the Senate likely will not vote before the election on allowing Americans to import less expensive prescription drugs from Canada and other countries. "It looks doubtful, just...

Desperately seeking cost controls for imaging.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... In search of ways to keep Medicare spending for positron emission tomography from busting the budget, Senate Finance Committee ranking Democrat Max Baucus would like to encourage such "market-based innovations" as mobile PET scan units, which...

Three strikes against Partial-Birth law, but DOJ says it's not out yet.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... A federal district court judge in Nebraska is the third judge to find unconstitutional a federal law banning certain abortion procedures. In a Sept. 8 decision, Judge Richard Kopf faulted the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban of 2003 for being...

Drugmakers, PBMs argue over USP Medicare formulary guidelines.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Draft model guidelines for the development of Medicare prescription drug benefit formularies, issued Aug. 19 by the United States Pharmacopeia 3/4 which was assigned the task in last year's Medicare Modernization Act 3/4 contain "146 unique...

HIGPA: no need for legislation on GPOs.(In Other News)(Health Industry Group Purchasing Association)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Group purchasing organizations, which buy medical supplies for hospitals and other health care providers, are seeking to head off greater regulation of their activities. "It is our strongly held belief that continued self-regulation...

Medicare Rights Center.(People)(Brief Article)
September 13, 2004... Joining the Medicare Rights Center as a senior policy council is Andrea Cohen. Most recently, she was a counsel on health issues and for oversight matters with the Senate Finance Committee. Earlier, she was an attorney in the Department of...

CMS posts comparison prices for popular drug classes.(Prescription Drugs)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... With the September 15 launch of a new price-comparison feature on the Medicare Web site, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson moved one modest step closer to his promised goal: a more transparent consumer marketplace for...

Specialty-hospital fight to return with vengeance in 2005.(In Medicine & Health Perspectives this week ...)
September 20, 2004... This is the first in a Perspectives series on issues raised by the recent rise of physician-owned specialty hospitals. One of the most hotly contested issues to arise during last year's debate of comprehensive Medicare legislation was the...

CMS rules on employers, formularies, PPOs raise concerns.(Medicare Modernization Act)(Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)
September 20, 2004... As the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services works to finalize regulations for last year's Medicare Modernization Act, the most anxiety from lawmakers and stakeholder groups seems focused on drug-formulary issues, region size for preferred...

Selective truth-telling dominates fight over premium.(Medicare Part B Premium)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Some Democrats continue to blame the Bush administration for the 17.4-percent premium hike on physician and outpatient services that will sock Medicare beneficiaries in 2005. As is the norm in a presidential election year, both sides are...

Job-based premiums rise by double digits ... again.(Employer-Based Premiums)
September 20, 2004... Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 11.2 percent in 2004, according to the latest annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust. That was down a bit from last year's...

Pet coverage announcement may herald new era in clinical trials.(Medicare Coverage Decisions)
September 20, 2004... The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a National Coverage Decision September 16 extending Medicare coverage for positron emission tomography to some beneficiaries with signs of dementia. Beneficiaries who meet diagnostic...

FDA working on pediatric warnings for antidepressants.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... In a September 14 25-1 vote, a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee recommended tough warnings on antidepressant labels saying that the drugs may increase the risk of suicide among children. The panel said all the antidepressants...

AEI cost estimate for Kerry plan more than doubles Thorpe's.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... The health care plan advanced by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) would cost the federal government $1.5 trillion over 10 years, according to a study released September 13 by the American Enterprise Institute That's...

Senate would increase CDC budget; house, Bush would cut it.(In Other News)(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... As if seeing its investigators portrayed on an NBC drama as National Institutes of Health employees was not enough, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention faced a funding cut of almost $120 million under President Bush's fiscal year...

Medicare advantage cost sharing should target discretionary spending, MedPAC chair says.(In Other News)(Payment Advisory Commission, Glenn Hackbarth )(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Medicare's private health plans should use higher cost sharing to encourage more prudent choices in discretionary care, not to rein in spending on services such as radiation or chemotherapy treatments for cancer or diabetes care, Medicare...

Health Strategies Consultancy.(People)(Jonathan Blum appointed)(Brief Article)
September 20, 2004... Former Senate Finance Committee Democratic aide Jonathan Blum has joined the Health Strategies Consultancy. Blum, a key staffer for the Medicare Modernization Act, will work on Medicaid issues.

New public, private initiatives will enroll more in drug card.(Low-Income Medicare Beneficiaries)
September 27, 2004... After months of pressure from low-income and senior advocacy groups and congressional Democrats, the Bush administration announced September 22 that beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare's low-income assistance programs will now be automatically...

Payment, the uninsured loom large in specialty-hospital debate.(In Medicine & Health Perspectives this week ...)
September 27, 2004... This is the second part of a Perspectives series on physician-owned specialty hospitals and their relationship to community health-delivery systems. The first appeared in our September 20 issue. Physicians in some popular, high-paying...

Private efforts will address hardest-to-find beneficiaries.
September 27, 2004... Even if outreach to the new auto-enrollees is as successful as Firman hopes, more than 4 million beneficiaries who are eligible for the $1,200 in transitional assistance will remain without it, he says. Finding and enrolling those...

Lewin estimate of Kerry health plan doubles campaign's figure.(Presidential Campaign)
September 27, 2004... Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry's (MA) health care plan would cost the federal government $1.25 trillion over 10 years, according to a study released Sept. 22 by the Lewin Group. That's almost double the $653 billion price...

Estimators differ over budget windows, savings from DM.(Brief Article)
September 27, 2004... A number of different factors lie behind the diverging estimates of Kerry's plan. For example, both Lewin and AEI use a budget window running from 2006 through 2015, while Thorpe uses a 2005-14 window. Depending on which estimates one compares,...

How broadly should plans' effects be measured?
September 27, 2004... At the Sept. 13 briefing where AEI unveiled its analysis, panelist Ken Kies of Clark Consulting criticized the Kerry plan as inefficient. He said it would spend about $5,500 per newly insured person per year, while the Bush plan would spend...

Panel: racism, cost keep minorities out of health professions.(Health Workforce)
September 27, 2004... A severe lack of minority health-care professionals is compounding persistent racial and ethnic disparities in access to care and clinical outcomes in the United States. That's one major finding of a report by the Sullivan Commission on the...

Accrediting bodies, governing boards must act, says panel.
September 27, 2004... To eliminate racism, it's first necessary to notice that it exists, and where, writes the Commission, whose 16 members include National Business Group on Health President Helen Darling, Johnson & Johnson Chair William Weldon, and former Rep....

Study: chronic ills mean unpaid bills.(Financing Care)(Brief Article)
September 27, 2004... Among working-age people with chronic conditions, more than one in five--12.3 million people--lived in families who reported problems paying medical bills last year. That's according to a report from the nonpartisan research and policy group...

Grants for state high-risk pools move forward.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 27, 2004... Grants For State High-Risk Pools Move Forward. A Senate committee has approved bipartisan legislation that would extend and expand federal grants for state high-risk pools. The grants, enacted as part of the Trade Adjustment Assistance...

California emergency-care system on verge of financial collapse, docs say.(In Other News)(Brief Article)
September 27, 2004... California Emergency-Care System On Verge Of Financial Collapse, Docs Say. Between them, hospitals and physicians lost over $635 million in emergency care they provided in California in fiscal year 2002--an 18 percent increase over the previous...

The Moran Company.(People)(Brief Article)
September 27, 2004... Steve Lieberman retires from federal service September 30 to join the Virginia-based consulting firm The Moran Company. A longtime analyst with the Congressional Budget Office and, earlier, at the White House Office of Management and Budget, he...