Health Care Delivery

Electronic health records are changing the way your family doctor does business, with most now able to view lab results or send a prescription online, a change that advocates say will improve efficiency and lead to fewer medical errors.

As Americans have begun shopping for health plans on the insurance exchanges, they are discovering that insurers are restricting their choice of doctors and hospitals in order to keep costs low, and that many of the plans exclude top-rated hospitals.

Oregon, a state that fully embraced the Affordable Care Act, is enduring one of the rockiest rollouts of President Barack Obama's signature health care law, with an inoperative online exchange that has yet to enroll a single subscriber, requiring thousands to apply on paper instead.

Pharmacy Times, The American Journal of Managed Care, and the Convenient Care Association presented a panel discussion on how the Affordable Care Act is affecting the health care landscape and opportunities it is offering to retail clinics.

The administration was warned last spring that its website didn't meet key requirements for a successful rollout, including relying too heavily on outside contractors, according to a copy of a Red Team report.

Seeking to defuse a growing political furor as millions of Americans receive cancellation notices from health insurers, the Obama administration will not require insurance companies to upgrade existing individual plans to meet the requirements of the federal healthcare law for 2014.

California has mistakenly sent letters to 246,000 low-income residents, warning they may need to find new doctors next year under the state's newly expanded Medicaid program.

Supporters and opponents of the federal health law still can't decide whether to call it the woodwork or welcome mat effect - the millions of people currently eligible for Medicaid who are not enrolled and who are expected to sign up as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

With millions of consumers getting cancellation notices for their current health plans, President Obama announced Thursday that he will encourage insurance companies to continue offering their customers the same health plans next year.

The initial state healthcare exchange enrollment numbers are in, and that amount is short of expected estimates.

About 8,000 Washington residents will soon receive letters informing them that the price they are expecting to pay for health insurance purchased on the new online exchange marketplace is incorrect.

Enrollment in health plans sold in the new health insurance marketplaces under the healthcare reform law appears to be lagging far behind targets.

In states refusing to expand Medicaid programs, many low-income individuals are likely to face even more difficulties in receiving care as a subsidy that assisted safety net hospitals is reduced under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

With increasing numbers of Americans gaining insurance under the Affordable Care Act, many experts are worried about the looming physician shortage.

For all the current focus on Obamacare lurching into its infancy, 50-year-old Medicare is also undergoing profound and disruptive change as Congress struggles with soaring medical bills and a growing senior population.

A government subsidy, little known outside health policy circles but critical to the hospitals' survival, is being sharply reduced under the new health law.

The agency tasked with implementing the president's healthcare law said Thursday it had uncovered new stresses further downstream in the system that revealed the need for a fresh look at the back-end capacity needs of the online healthcare portal.

Bowing to intense criticism, President Barack Obama apologized to Americans who are losing health insurance plans he repeatedly said they could keep and pledged to find fixes that might allow people to keep their coverage.

Millions of people could qualify for federal subsidies that will pay the entire monthly cost of some health care plans being offered in the online marketplaces set up under President Obama's health care law, a surprising figure that has not garnered much attention, in part because the zero-premium plans come with serious trade-offs.

A recent analysis shows that people are electing to enroll in Medicaid instead of buying private health insurance on the 15 state-based health insurance exchanges. It's projected that if this trend continues, there will not be enough healthy young people buying health insurance to make the system work.

The challenges in reforming healthcare seemingly continue to increase.

One month into open enrollment on the health insurance exchanges, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized for what she described as a "miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans" on the federal online marketplace known as HealthCare.gov.

After focusing for weeks on the technical failures of President Obama's health insurance website, Republicans on Tuesday broadened their criticism of the health care law, pointing to Americans whose health plans have been terminated because they do not meet the law's new coverage requirements.

Consumers who buy a health insurance policy good for only 364 days might save hundreds of dollars in premiums, but they could also find themselves without important benefits and charged a penalty for not having insurance next year.

Under PPACA, in every interaction between patients, doctors, insurers, manufacturers and researchers, the incentive to control costs and provide better service is replaced with the decree to do so.

The premiums for Medicare Part B will remain flat in 2014 and seniors have saved $8.3 billion on Part D prescriptions since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday.

Amid the havoc of a healthcare insurance exchange website overwhelmed with problems, many aired concerns as to whether the individual mandate penalty would be delayed.In addition to President Obama calling in reinforcements to address exchange technology problems, the administration announced Wednesday that it would extend the consumer enrollment deadline until March 31, 2014.

The Obama administration said Wednesday that it would delay imposing penalties for six weeks on some consumers who might have been caught in a sticky timing problem for enrolling in coverage through the health law's new insurance marketplaces.

Data now obtainable from HealthCare.gov show there are 78,437 variations of health plans throughout the 36 states covered under the federal government's troubled web site, ranging from a bare-bones policy going for $81.34 a month in Kansas for a 27-year-old, up to a so-called gold family plan with an HMO in Virginia costing $6,494.54 a month.