SciCombinator

Since 2010, England has experienced relative constraints in public expenditure on healthcare (PEH) and social care (PES). We sought to determine whether these constraints have affected mortality rates.

Overtreatment is a cause of preventable harm and waste in health care. Little is known about clinician perspectives on the problem. In this study, physicians were surveyed on the prevalence, causes, and implications of overtreatment.

Since 2010, the fate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been uncertain. The ACA was a historic achievement for the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats. But it passed Congress without a single Republican vote, and the GOP subsequently mounted legal and legislative challenges to Obamacare, vowing to repeal and replace it. The Supreme Court decision in June 2012 upholding the ACA’s constitutionality dealt a serious blow to the law’s opponents. Now, in the aftermath of the 2012 elections, with President Barack Obama reelected and Democrats maintaining majority control of the Senate, Republicans lack a viable option . . .

The United States spends $361 billion annually on health care administration - more than twice our total spending on heart disease and three times our spending on cancer. But the experience of other industries shows how to realize large savings rapidly.

“Tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes - and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier.” - President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 20, 2015 President Obama has long expressed a strong conviction that science offers great potential for improving health. Now, the President has announced a research initiative that aims to accelerate progress toward a new era of precision medicine (www.whitehouse.gov/precisionmedicine). We believe that the time is right for this visionary initiative, . . .

The 2016 National Academies of Sciences report “Hearing Health Care for Adults: Priorities for Improving Access and Affordability” included a call to action for government agencies to strengthen efforts to collect, analyze, and disseminate population-based data on hearing loss in adults.

Disease-associated malnutrition has been identified as a prevalent condition, particularly for the elderly, which has often been overlooked in the U.S. healthcare system. The state-level burden of community-based disease-associated malnutrition is unknown and there have been limited efforts by state policy makers to identify, quantify, and address malnutrition. The objective of this study was to examine and quantify the state-level economic burden of disease-associated malnutrition.

Now that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has expanded health care coverage and made it affordable to many more Americans, we have the opportunity to shape the way care is delivered and improve the quality of care systemwide, while helping to reduce the growth of health care costs. Many efforts have already been initiated on these fronts, leveraging the ACA’s new tools. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) now intends to focus its energies on augmenting reform in three important and interdependent ways: using incentives to motivate higher-value care, by increasingly tying payment to value through alternative payment . . .

Perhaps the only health policy issue on which Republicans and Democrats agree is the need to move from volume-based to value-based payment for health care providers. Rather than paying for activity, the aspirational goal is to pay for outcomes that take into account quality and costs. In keeping with this notion of paying for value rather than volume, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) created the “value-based payment modifier,” or “value modifier,” a pay-for-performance approach for physicians who actively participate in Medicare. By 2017, physicians will be rewarded or penalized on the basis of the relative calculated value of the care . . .

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) poses a substantial burden to health care payers including employers, costing an estimated $29 billion-$48 billion yearly in the United States. Furthermore, variation of burden across increasing levels of resistance and the potential impact of TRD on employment status remain largely unexplored.