When I saw my first red blanket as a young medical student, I thought little of it. One morning, as I rushed around a hospital in California on my daily rounds, I spotted an old man who lay in bed beneath a scarlet cover, a sharp contrast to the white linens wrapped around the other […]
Imagine you’re a Medicare patient, and you go to your doctor for an ultrasound of your heart one month. Medicare pays your doctor’s office $189, and you pay about 20 percent of that bill as a co-payment. Then, the next month, your doctor’s practice has been bought by the local hospital. You go to the […]
Lots of people shopping in the new health care marketplaces this year picked health plans that limited their choice of doctors and hospitals. The plans were popular because they tended to cost less than more conventional plans that covered nearly every health care provider in a region. The proliferation of these more limited plans, called […]
In a much-anticipated move, the New York state Legislature recently agreed to spend $55 million to create a statewide digital highway for New Yorkers’ medical records. Known as the State Health Information Network of New York, and called “Shiny” for its acronym, SHIN-NY, the project will connect millions of patients, thousands of doctors and scores […]