Longer Looks: Hospitals On A Weekend; Health Care Costs; Latino Enrollment
Each week, KHN's Shefali Luthra finds interesting reads from around the Web.
The New England Journal Of Medicine:
Death Takes A Weekend
From the physician's perspective, weekends in the hospital are all about coverage. I remember, during residency, feeling that the attendings brought in doughnuts for weekend rounds because the world owed us something for being there, holding the fort. I came to take it for granted that hospital life slows on the weekend. ... But when you're sick and scared, or when your parent or child is sick and scared, it can be shocking to hear, over and over, about the ways that weekends are slower and things don't get done. (Perri Klass, 1/29)
The Dallas Morning News:
Cost Of Care: The U.S. Health Care System Is Bleeding Green
For more than 30 years, medical spending grew faster than pay for the average American worker. Real wages (controlled for inflation) actually decreased 4 percent, while health care costs are almost six times higher, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said in 2009. That bumped up health insurance premiums and left less money for everything else. (Jim Landers, 1/31)
The New York Times:
Managing Health Costs With Crowdfunding
Norm Breyfogle, a comic book artist known for his work on Batman, found himself struggling after a stroke in December. He had no health insurance. He was partly paralyzed on his left side, unable to use his valuable drawing hand. And Mr. Breyfogle, 54, was in a nursing home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, facing months of physical therapy. Worried about his brother’s rapidly rising bills, Kevin Breyfogle decided to step in. He started a crowdfunding campaign, which raises small donations from donors, on the site YouCaring. (Constance Gustke, 1/30)
The New Yorker:
The Trip Treatment
The effects of psilocybin resemble those of LSD, but, as one researcher explained, “it carries none of the political and cultural baggage of those three letters.” LSD is also stronger and longer-lasting in its effects, and is considered more likely to produce adverse reactions. Researchers are using or planning to use psilocybin not only to treat anxiety, addiction (to smoking and alcohol), and depression but also to study the neurobiology of mystical experience, which the drug, at high doses, can reliably occasion. Forty years after the Nixon Administration effectively shut down most psychedelic research, the government is gingerly allowing a small number of scientists to resume working with these powerful and still somewhat mysterious molecules. (Michael Pollan, 2/9)
Modern Healthcare:
Push To Modify Pay Must Overcome Fee-For-Service System
Last week, HHS pledged that half of Medicare spending outside of managed care—roughly $360 billion last year—would be funneled through accountable care and other new payment arrangements by 2018. Separately last week, a coalition of health systems, insurers and employers including Trinity and Aetna, called the Health Care Transformation Task Force, vowed that 75% of their business would be tied to new financial incentives by 2020. But even as such contracts proliferate, the financial incentives for hospitals and medical groups to eliminate waste and improve care have barely changed. (Bob Herman and Melanie Evans, 1/31)
FiveThirtyEight:
Latino Enrollment Is Critical For Obamacare, So Is It Happening?
Now, as we enter the final month of the second open-enrollment period of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the numbers look good, with the government on track to surpass the year’s signup goal of 9.1 million people. Young adults and Latinos are particularly important groups for the enrollment effort. While we have data on young adults (35 percent of people who enrolled in the second period are currently under the age of 35, beating out last year’s 28 percent1), understanding Latino enrollment has been more challenging. (Anna Maria Barry-Jester, 2/2)