Blog and News

On any given day, thousands of patients seek medical help from doctors who then order more tests and procedures than are medically necessary.

It’s not that the tests help with the diagnosis or assist with treatment. The doctor orders these MRIs, X-rays, CT scans and blood work, for example, solely to keep from being sued.

Gallup says one in four health care dollars spent in American can be attributed to these unnecessary procedures. In Georgia, the cost of defensive medicine is estimated to be about $13.25 billion annually.

 

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Independent Women's Voice, an educational advocacy organization that runs the Repeal Pledge calling for the elimination of ObamaCare, believes that opinions about health care can be changed. When people's views are based on faulty or incomplete information, IWV has had great success in changing those views by offering solid information.

Over one week in mid-September, IWV conducted a message test among independent voters in 24,000 households spread over four states. The goal was to see if simply providing the facts about the true costs of the health law would affect popular support. Would independents, once they were educated about little-known but very real aspects of ObamaCare's popular elements, change their minds about those elements? Would their support overall for repeal increase?

After just one week of intensive, multipart, multimedia education message delivery to households in the test group, the results were dramatic.

No single issue will be more politicized this election than Medicare and efforts to reform this primary driver of our nation's long-term debt. Please read the following article exposing two major deceptions being propagated by the media and liberals intent on scaring the nation's seniors. Don't forget to read the links at the bottom of the article. They are enormously helpful to understanding this contentious issue.

Conservatives have been burning up the Internet making it very clear that the AEI scholar who sees ObamaCare as a conservative dream speaks only for himself and definitely NOT for genuine health policy conservatives.

J.D. Kleinke, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of free-market thinking, wrote a controversial opinion piece for The New York Times Sunday claiming to make “The Conservative Case for Obamacare.”

That Kleinke sees ObamaCare as even remotely conservative reveals his poor analysis based on a misreading of the plain facts of the law. His piece fails to meet even a reasonable standard of scholarship. Here’s a quick overview of responses from our colleagues in the health policy community in published articles this week:

Doctors are working less, seeing fewer patients, and many would quit if they could, a sweeping survey of 13,575 physicians from across the nation shows.

The survey, A Survey of America's Physicians: Practice Patterns and Perspectives, was commissioned by The Physicians Foundation. It is the latest, and perhaps the largest and most comprehensive of a number of surveys that have identified wide, deep and increasing discontent among the nation's physicians regardless of their age, gender, specialty, location, or employment status.

"It is downbeat and it is a concern. What we are documenting here is a trend and the trend is pretty solid," Walker Ray, MD, vice president of the nonprofit foundation, told HealthLeaders Media.

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Six years after its passage of a statewide healthcare reform law, Massachusetts' physician shortage in 2012 has hit critical and severe levels for seven specialties. It's a slight improvement from last year's shortage but may be a condition suggestive of what the country may face under national healthcare reform.

One of the key provisions of the ObamaCarelaw that could result in drastic cuts to hospitals for treating the elderly and the poor will kick in today. In an attempt to rein in the costs of medical care which many critics say will hurt the elderly and the poor the most, the ObamaCare law will now mandate as of Oct. 1, 2012 that patients who need to return to the hospital for follow-up admissions within 30 days of discharge may not get the level of care they have come to expect.

The new provision will place fines on hospitals for treating returning patients who are readmitted within 30 days after discharge. Critics say that this will lead to serious declines in both the level and quality of care rendered to patients.