Word: hmos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...aisle, effectively killing his popularity. These proposals included such radical ideas as automatic health-coverage for all American children up to the age of 25 in a program called MediKids, lower prescription prices for seniors, importing prescription drugs from Canada, and allowing patients the right to sue HMOs. These recent threats to shoot down the health care proposals come notwithstanding the fact that Liebermann, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, to date has received over $930,000 in campaign contributions from professionals in the health care and medical sectors...
...rational, understandable document, but that's not proving to be easy. Publication has been delayed at least twice, and the association now doesn't expect to produce DSM-5 until 2013, 14 years after research on it began. One reason is that there are so many stakeholders: patients, shrinks, HMOs, academics. Patients want their illnesses covered; shrinks need to get paid academics want definitions to be consistent with research - research that is itself uneven. Sometimes, DSM changes can be made on the basis of long-term, peer-reviewed studies. But other times, such gold-standard research data is lacking...
Less Is Much More In the years since the reviled health-maintenance organizations (HMOs) were at their peak, all manner of fixes have been proposed to the health-care system, from small tweaks to wholesale overhauls. There's pay-for-performance: compensation depending on doctors' success in keeping costs down and getting patients well. There's episode care: a fixed price for a procedure like a heart bypass that covers everything from pre-op to surgery to full recuperation. Most broadly, there's global care, which provides access to a diverse team of caregivers who cover all of a patient...
...HMOs spread and the ranks of the uninsured grew, however, TV handed out fewer lollipops to the medical profession. In 1994, at the peak of the Clinton health-care fight, NBC announced ER, on which overwhelmed County General hospital treated the underinsured masses who didn't have access to preventive medicine. As Anthony Edwards reminisced to the New York Times, "It was the beginning of the era when the emergency room became primary care...
That won't be easy to change. The 1990s managed-care boom was supposed to incentivize HMOs to keep us healthy, but it slashed needed as well as unneeded care in a frenzy of willy-nilly cost-cutting and short-term profit-taking, triggering a national backlash. And if Congress gets into the details of what would be reimbursed under a new fee-for-quality structure, the same interest-group politics that have distorted and ultimately paralyzed the current system could dominate the new system; that's why Obama has proposed to depoliticize those decisions through an independent agency similar...