(Consult A Doctor, Legal Care Direct, Financial Helpline, NBRX Pharmacy Benefits, Roadside Assistance, Identity Theft Protection, Emergency Medical Travel Assistance, My eWellness, Optum Health Allies Discount Program and Direct Labs.)
Recording Length: 37 Minutes
Length of Talk Radio Program: 5 minutes
1 in 5 Americans is postponing health care
Twenty percent of Americans say they have delayed or postponed medical care, mostly doctor visits, and many said cost was the main reason, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters released on Monday.
That figure is up since 2006, the last time the question was asked on the survey, when 15.9 percent of people said they had postponed or canceled medical care in the past year.
"The results of this survey have serious implications for public health officials, hospital administrators, and healthcare consumers," Gary Pickens of the Healthcare division of Thomson Reuters, who led the study, said in a statement. "We are seeing a positive correlation between Americans losing their access to employer-sponsored health insurance and deferral of healthcare."
In the most recent survey, 21 percent of U.S. adults expected to have difficulty paying for health insurance or healthcare services in the next three months.
Pickens added that "if this trend continues, it will ultimately have an impact on our collective well-being."
Thomson Reuters Healthcare is part of the same company as the Reuters news agency.
Pickens and colleagues surveyed 12,000 Americans in February and March and said their findings were representative of the United States in general.
They found that 24 percent of people who canceled or postponed care said cost was the primary reason.
More than 54 percent who skipped care said they missed a doctor visit. Eight percent said they delayed or skipped medical imaging of some sort.
Pickens and colleagues found the percentage of households with employer-sponsored insurance declined to 54.6 percent in 2009 from 59 percent in early 2008. The percentage of adults covered by Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance plan for the poor, rose to 14.5 percent in 2009 from 11.9 percent in 2008.
Written by MSNBC on April 21, 2009
News & Information
Reading today's health care news clips you get a real clear picture of how the economic crisis facing this country is throwing people into the worse parts of our failing health care system. Our current healthcare system is not only broken; it is in crisis. It is indisputable that we are currently in a health care crisis with skyrocketing costs and extreme customer dissatisfaction. The U.S. healthcare crisis is now a part of the financial crisis according to Senator Chuck Hagel. The economic recession has dramatically boosted the numbers of uninsured as employers have fired workers in record numbers. The economic crisis has produced a tsunami of newly unemployed Americans seeking help with health care. The economic crisis and the health care crisis are not separate. They are closely related according to many of our political leaders. Among other things, when people lose jobs, they frequently lose their health care benefits.
Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, half of that number obese. Americans spend an average $7,000 annually on "health care," 16 percent of gross domestic product. That's the world's highest, and twice the per capita spending of Japan, where life expectancy is 83 years, compared to our 77.9.
ProvisionUS is all about Family Protection!
If I knew the secret on how you could talk to a board certified medical doctor over thephone 24/7, 365 days a year --- get your prescriptions without an office visit --- and save 10% to 60% on your prescriptions, while earning some extra money --- possibly some serious money by sharing these services with others, would that interest you? Of course it would!
Senate health-care bill would still leave millions uninsured
Even as Democrats seek the biggest expansion of health coverage in decades, as many as 23 million people could still be without insurance by 2018, illustrating the complexity of achieving the long-held Democratic goal of universal health care.
This Story
The legislation that the Senate passed Christmas Eve, which is expected to resemble closely the final bill that is hashed out between the House and Senate over the next month, would leave about 8 percent of the population under age 65 without health insurance, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It would extend insurance to 31 million of an estimated 54 million who would have no coverage without the legislation.
"The impact of the reform overall is that we can focus more on care and less on how we pay for the uninsured, but the problem is still going to be there," said Chip Kahn, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, a lobbying group that has endorsed the Democratic plan.
But those who would be left uninsured have drawn little attention. This is in part because their ranks would include many who choose not to get health insurance, even though they can afford it -- such as some healthy people under 30, who have little effect on rising health-care costs because they rarely go to the doctor. Though starting in 2014, individuals would face fines if they do not buy coverage, some may still refuse.
About a third of the uninsured would be illegal immigrants. Neither party supports expanding insurance to cover them, even though states spend millions caring for them at hospitals, where emergency rooms accept patients regardless of coverage.
Some Republicans have seized on the uninsured number to attack the health-care legislation, even though they oppose mandating the purchase of insurance and covering illegal immigrants. "After raising billions in new taxes, cutting about a half-trillion dollars from Medicare, and imposing stiff new penalties for people who don't buy insurance and increasing costs for those that do, 23 million people will still not even have health insurance," Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said before the Senate vote.
White House spokesman Reid Cherlin countered that "tens of millions of Americans will gain affordable coverage under this bill."
The elusive 100 percent
Despite complaints about those left uninsured, some health-care experts defend the legislation, noting the difficulty of reaching 100 percent coverage.
"If you're at 84 percent and you are going to 94 percent, you picked up roughly two-thirds of the problem, which is big," said John Holahan, director of the Health Policy Center at the liberal Urban Institute, referring to the percentage of legal U.S. residents who will have health insurance under the Senate plan. "If the economy comes back, you can pick up a good chunk of the rest. Most European countries don't get 100 percent -- the data I've seen is always 98 or 99 percent."
The CBO has not released a breakdown of who would make up the 23 million. Along with illegal immigrants and people who choose not to buy coverage, there are two groups of people likely to be uninsured: those who are eligible for Medicaid but don't sign up for it, and those who would qualify for an exemption from the coverage mandate because paying for insurance would take up more than 8 percent of their income.
The CBO estimates that the House version of the legislation would expand insurance to 36 million people, reducing the ranks of the uninsured to about 18 million. It would offer slightly higher subsidies for low-income people, reducing the number who cannot afford insurance, and it has stronger penalties for companies that do not offer insurance to workers and individuals who do not purchase it. But the House legislation would cost more than $1 trillion, compared with the $871 billion Senate package.
Illegal immigrants barred
Latino activists and some Democratic lawmakers have complained about a provision in the Senate bill that bars illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance in new health insurance exchanges, which would serve people who do not have affordable employer-based coverage. Without access to those exchanges, such immigrants would have few health insurance options, although it's not clear how many could afford or would want to purchase coverage.
There is little support in Congress for extending health insurance through Medicaid or subsidies to the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States.
This Story
Congress is seeking to cover people who are under 30 and who find insurance an expense they can live without because they are generally healthy; many in this group hold part-time jobs that do not offer coverage. Lawmakers' goal is twofold: reducing the burden on hospitals to care for the uninsured and broadening the pool of people with insurance, since including those who are healthy helps lower costs for the ill. The legislation would create health plans with low monthly costs designed to appeal to young people.
Some experts say this group -- 13 million Americans, according to some estimates -- will remain sizable despite the mandate. But David Cutler, an economist at Harvard who advised Barack Obama on health care during the presidential campaign, said this group could be almost universally insured if the law was implemented properly, thereby reducing the total number of uninsured to much less than 20 million.
He said that if the bill becomes law, the government should look to Massachusetts, which passed a requirement in 2006 that every resident get insurance. The state ran commercials during the broadcast of Boston Red Sox baseball games encouraging people to sign up, helping reach young men. Only about 45,000 of the nearly 4 million who filed taxes last year in Massachusetts were fined for refusing to buy insurance.
Cutler said a similar effort could encourage people who would newly qualify for Medicaid, which would be expanded to cover most households earning less than $30,000 a year.
"If we do it right," Cutler said, "I'm not very worried we will have lots of uninsured."
Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33863680/ns/health-health_care/
Clinic with two doors, a symbol of two-tier care
One side is for patients with insurance, the other for those who pay up front
Once you use it, you never want to lose it!
Click HERE to read the article on CNNMoney.com.
Unemployment hits 10.2%
The unemployment rate spiked to its highest level since 1983, much worse than expected as employers continue to trim jobs despite other signs of growth.
The reading, reported by the government Friday, is a sign of the continued weakness in the labor market even though the economy grew in the third quarter following the longest and deepest downturn since the Great Depression.
The government reported Friday that unemployment rate spiked to 10.2%, up from 9.8% in September. It is the highest that this rate has been since April 1983. Economists had forecast an increase to 9.9%.
There was also a net loss of 190,000 jobs in October, according to the Labor Department, an improvement from a revised estimate of 219,000 job losses in September. However, economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast a loss of only 175,000 jobs in October. This was the 22nd straight month of job losses.
Government efforts to end job losses have had limited effects, although the Obama administration estimated last month that 640,000 jobs were created or saved by the federal stimulus package passed earlier this year. But that's modest compared to the 7.3 million jobs that have been lost by the economy since the start of 2008.
Friday's report comes one day after Congress voted overwhelmingly to extend unemployment benefits by up to 20 weeks. There are now a record 5.6 million people who have been unemployed for six months or longer, as the average time an unemployed person has been out of a job hit 26.9 weeks.
Prior to this report, most economists had believed that the unemployment rate would keep rising and that job losses would continue into next year. But the jump in unemployment in October took it to levels worse than what many previously had expected to be the peak.
According to a survey of top forecasters by the National Association of Business Economics last month, the consensus estimate among economists was that unemployment would hit a high of 10% in the final three months of this year and the first quarter of 2010.
The five economists with the most bearish forecasts had expected unemployment to rise to 10.2% in the fourth quarter of this year before hitting 10.5% in the first half of next year.
THE ANSWER TO THE
"MEDICAL EMERGENCY "
ARTICLE BELOW!
Dial- A- Doc Around the Clock
Telemedicine At Its Best!
Click HERE to read the article on Forbes.com.
Heads Up
Medical Emergency
Daniel Fisher, 10.29.09, 09:40 AM EDTForbes Magazine dated November 16, 2009
We need more primary care doctors. Why is it so hard to get them through residency programs? 
President Obama says he can increase access to health care while driving down costs. Maybe he can. But whatever the cost, improving care will be impossible without more doctors. Primary care physicians, essential to keeping chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure from escalating into expensive hospital visits, are in short supply: The American Academy of Family Physicians predicts a shortage of 40,000 general practice docs within ten years as U.S. med school grads favor higher-paying specialties. (At the moment 32% of the 941,000 U.S. doctors are in primary care.) That shortfall will only get worse if the federal government expands coverage. "If 40 million people come online with access to medicine, the system won't be able to accommodate them," says Dr. Russell Robertson, chairman of the Council on Graduate Medical Education and a professor at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine.
One solution would be to import doctors from other countries, but a combination of tight licensing rules and a limited number of residency slots holds down their numbers. Last year 10,000 foreign-trained docs applied for slots in American residency programs, a necessary first step to practicing in the U.S.; 7,000 got in. "They are turned away all the time," says Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer who specializes in representing medical professionals.
Applying for a residency slot can be daunting. Foreign citizens must pass an exam offered only in the U.S. before they can apply, and getting a travel visa is difficult in places like India and Pakistan. Assuming they get here and pass the exam, doctors need a longer-term visa in order to stay for residency. But the J-1 education visa requires applicants to swear they have no intention of staying in the U.S.--and will leave when their training is done.
A bigger obstacle lies with Congress. The federal government effectively controls the number of residency positions through the Medicare program, which pays a subsidy of $8.8 billion to hospital training programs. In 1997 Congress determined the country had enough doctors and capped the number of slots it would pay for at around 98,000. Since then the U.S. population has grown 13%, but residency slots have risen only 11% to 109,000, with all that rise coming in higher-paying specialties like cardiology and surgery.
The cap, plus a steadily increasing number of U.S. medical school graduates seeking residency slots, means the number of places available for foreign docs will decline. Foreign-trained physicians (including Americans who attended medical school abroad) now represent 27% of residents in training. Enrollments at U.S. schools are increasing 2% a year, with all those grads taking slots that otherwise would be available to foreigners.
There are proposals in Congress to increase the number of Medicare-funded residency slots by as many as 15,000, but they are competing for the same dollars that would be used to subsidize health premiums for the poor. Meanwhile, thousands of fully trained physicians wait outside the borders, pining to get at the lucrative U.S. medical market.
"As the physician shortage deepens, we will eventually get to the point where we're maxed out on how hard people can work," says Richard (Buzz) Cooper, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and supporter of increasing the number of physicians. "It's hard for me to see how the doors won't open."
Critical Shortage
While the workload for primary-care doctors will rise, the supply will drop as existing physicians age and graduates move into higher-paying specialties.
If I knew the secret on how you could talk to a board certified medical doctor over thephone 24/7, 365 days a year --- get your prescriptions without an office visit --- and save 10% to 60% on your prescriptions, while earning some extra money --- possibly some serious money by sharing these services with others, would thatinterest you? Of course it would!
Longer days, lower pay, less prestige and more administrative headaches have turned doctors away in droves from family medicine, presumed to be the frontline for wellness and preventive-care programs that can help reduce health care costs.
The number of U.S. medical school students going into primary care has dropped 51.8% since 1997, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP).
Considering it takes 10 to 11 years to educate a doctor, the drying up of the pipeline is a big concern to health-care experts. The AAFP is predicting a shortage of 40,000 family physicians in 2020, when the demand is expected to spike. The U.S. health care system has about 100,000 family physicians and will need 139,531 in 10 years. The current environment is attracting only half the number needed to meet the demand.
At the heart of the rising demands on primary-care physicians will be the 78 million Baby Boomers born from 1946 to 1964, who begin to turn 65 in 2011 and will require increasing medical care, and the current group of underserved patients.
If Congress passes health care legislation that extends insurance coverage to a significant part of the 47 million Americans who lack insurance, the need for more doctors is going to escalate.
The primary-care doctor — a category that includes family physicians, general internists and general pediatricians — has been held up as the gatekeeper in keeping people out of emergency rooms and controlling health care costs. But medical analysts say giving this limited pool of doctors responsibility for millions more patients is problematic.
"That tsunami wave (of patients) is going to be huge," says Bruce Bates, interim dean at University of New England's college of osteopathic medicine in Biddeford, Maine.
Finding a doctor will get increasingly difficult, waits for appointments will grow longer, and more sick people will turn to crowded emergency rooms, says Ted Epperly, president of the AAFP, an association that represents more than 93,000 physicians. Or, if a patient goes to a doctor's office, he might not be treated by his doctor: One way overwhelmed family physicians have been dealing with patients is to have office visits overseen by a nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant, some of whom can dispense certain prescriptions and recommend specialists, Epperly says.
"At the time we need family-care physicians the most, we are producing the least," Epperly says. "The nation's medical schools are failing to produce a workforce that is essential to caring for America's communities."
Gingrich, Center for Health Transformation push value of telemedicine
WASHINGTON – Telemedicine can improve access, lower costs and enhance the quality of healthcare and government should do more to remove barriers to its use, according to a new paper by the Center for Health Transformation (CHT).
The paper, titled "Telephone Medical Consults Answer the Call for Accessible, Affordable and Convenient Healthcare," was co-authored by Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and founder of CHT; Rick Boxer, MD, chairman of the National Health Policy Council; and George Byron Brooks, MD, a leading telemedicine practitioner.
"Americans expect and deserve high quality, accessible health care services," Gingrich said. "Telemedicine will play an increasingly central role in getting the right care at the right time to individuals and families."
According to the paper, physicians have relied on telephone consults for decades, but only recently has the issue expanded to a national level. In addition, electronic health records enhance the use of medical telephone consults and support continuity of care.
"Healthcare in America has been enhanced by remarkable research to find new answers to age-old medical problems," Boxer said. "However, potentially the weakest link is that between the doctor and the patient. Telemedicine bridges the gap between theoretical availability and realistic accessibility."
Health care reform up in air as economy sinks
People go without medications because they can't afford a visit to their doctor to get their prescriptions filled.
MORE UNINSURED
Without changes in policy, the number of uninsured under age 65 is projected to rise 20% from 2009 to 2019.
• 2009: 45 million
• 2019: 54 million
Source: Congressional Budget Office
Paul Ginsburg, an economist with the Center for Studying Health System Change, said that the economic recession means more people will be losing their jobs and employer-sponsored health benefits.
Unfortunately, skipping doses, cutting pills in half or simply doing without is an every day occurrence for the nearly 42 million Americans without health insurance. It's also a fact of life for millions of seniors on Medicare, but whose supplemental insurance doesn't cover prescription drugs.
People who can't afford their medication often can't afford a visit to the doctor. And if they do get there, the subject of affordability might not come up.
"They are too ashamed to say they cannot afford the medications," Dr. Rich Sagall says.
Both the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and IMS Health have reports out that suggest Americans are not filling prescriptions and not going to the doctor because they're financially stretched.
Washington, D.C. – A new national survey of women on their health finds that a substantial percentage of women cannot afford to go to the doctor or get prescriptions filled. The Kaiser Family Foundation report, Women and Health Care: A National Profile.
Sick Americans struggle in ailing economy
By LINDSEY TANNER and LINDA A. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writers
Published Tuesday, October 28, 2008
"The ailing economy is leading many Americans to skip doctor visits and skimp on their medicine."
Disclosures:
If you have an urgent medical condition, please dial 911. Consult A Doctor is not health insurance, and does not replace your primary care physician. Consult A Doctor does not guaranteed that you will receive prescription medications. Consult A Doctor’s physicians do not prescribe DEA –controlled medications or lifestyle drugs. All services are HIPAA-compliant.
