MASSDEVICE ON CALL — As a federal appeals court prepares today to consider a pair of challenges to the health care law, Beltway legislators are unveiling their visions for reforming the American health care system.
The proposals range from President Barack Obama’s landmark Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act to a radical plan to spike Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare and replace them with a single-payer system run by the states.
Obama’s plan for Medicare would create a panel with the power to enforce a spending cap and juice cuts already contained in the health care law. On the Republican side, a House proposal for subsidizing private insurance for everyone younger than 54 met with a furious response from the Baby Boomer set and is a dead letter in the Senate.
Another GOP measure would leave Medicare largely intact but repeal the health care reform law — and the massive reimbursement rate cuts facing the public health program. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) is slated to reveal his plan today, which calls for a freeze on Medicare reimbursement rates but repeals pending cuts to reimbursement rates for physicians, according to a copy of the plan obtained by The Hill. Toomey’s budget would also retool medical malpractice statutes to generate an estimated $64 billion in savings.
And Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) are expected to release a bill today that would create a state-based single-payer health care system to replace Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and insurance exchanges established under the ACA. Their new system would be paid for by a schedule of tax increases and the cash saved from spiking the other programs, according to the website.
Half of Mass. docs no longer see new patients: More than half of the Bay State’s primary care physicians no longer accept new patients and waiting times are on the rise, according to a study by the Mass. Medical Society.
That’s because of the dearth of new primary care physicians. It seems the kids these days just aren’t into primary care, what with its long, grueling hours and relatively lower pay. That leaves an ever-expanding patient pool to be served by fewer and fewer PCPs, according to the MMS.
“There’s only so many patients you can see in a day,” , Dr. Lynda Young, a pediatrician and president-elect of the society, told BusinessWeek.
In a phone survey of 838 doctors in February and March, 51 percent of the Commonwealth’s internists and 53 percent of its family physicians said they no longer take new patients. And although the average wait for an appointment with an internist was five days shorter than last year, at 48 days, the average wait to to a family doc was up by a week, to 36 days.
Dr. Richard Dupee, a PCP suburban Boston, told BusinessWeek that he still adds new patients to his roster of 8,000, but only because he’s willing to log the long hours youngsters won’t.
“They really look upon lifestyle more importantly than income,” Dupee told the magazine. “They want to quit at 5 o’clock, is the bottom line.”
Study: A fourth of patients get too many colonoscopies: A study of 24,000 Medicare patients age 66 and older showed that as many a one-fourth received too many colonoscopies to screen for cancer.
The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, revealed that 1 in 4 of the patients, whose first exam screened normal, went on to have another colonoscopy over the next seven years, with no clear medical reason listed in their records. Guidelines call for colonoscopy every 10 years to screen for cancerous and pre-cancerous evidence of slow-growing colo-rectal tumors.
About one in a thousand colonoscopies winds up with the patient hospitalized for complications ranging from major bleeding to a colon tear, researcher Dr. James Goodwin of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston told Reuters Health.
Heart Check America shutters Colorado clinic in state probe: Medical imaging provider Health Check America shuttered its Colorado shop after Centennial State regulators told it to stop selling radiology services without referrals.
Warren Smith, manager of the Colorado Department of Health’s hazardous material division, told Reuters that Health Check America never responded to an April letter ordering it to stop offering its “virtual physical” screens of the heart, lungs, bone density and other scans without doctors’ orders. The scans weren’t read by a radiologist or sent to patients in a timely matter, violations of Colorado law.
“We do not feel a whole body scan is an appropriate screening tool for an asymptomatic patient,” the agency wrote, adding that patient exposure to radiation “must have some benefit for the patient.”
The company is accused of using heavy-handed sales tactics to push 10-year packages costing thousands of dollars that do not include a diagnosis or follow-up. And the doc the company registered as the Colorado operation’s supervising physician isn’t licensed to practice medicine in the state, Smith told Reuters.
Face transplant recipient says his face feels natural: Dallas Wiens, who received the first full face transplant in the U.S., says his new mug feels natural and “as if it’s my own.”
In his first press appearance since surgery to replace his nose, lips, skin, muscle and nerves from an anonymous donor, Wiens said the first thing his four-year-old daughter said when she saw him after the surgery was “Daddy, you’re so handsome!”
Wiens, 26, also said “there are no words to truly describe the debt of gratitude or love that I have … for the donor’s family. The choice that they made has in a very real, a very great way, changed my life and my daughter’s. So, from the bottom of my heart, and I know from the bottom of hers, we both thank you very much.”
Wiens lost his features in an electrical accident in late 2008. The injuries deprived him of his sense of smell, which has returned since his transplant. He was enthusiastic about his questionable first scent, the lasagna at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital.
“It smelled delicious,” he said.
