Also serving the communities of De Luz, Rainbow, Camp Pendleton, Pala and Pauma
Also serving the communities of De Luz, Rainbow, Camp Pendleton, Pala and Pauma
Sorted by date Results 26 - 41 of 41
Solicitations for Medicare Advantage plans once again have been arriving in the mail, promising the best bargain since sliced bread. A case in point is one from Emblem Health, a managed care company in my area that said it considers me what they call a “candidate” for their “special needs plan.” I don’t qualify for such a plan. The solicitation was interesting, though, for what it promised. Free transportation to and from doctor, hospital and lab appointments but only up to 24 one-way trips a year. It also promised “no refer...
Association health insurance is back. Perhaps residents remember those policies that were offered as a member of a local business or social group or trade association. The policies were usually marketed as “affordable” – whatever that meant in those days. Sometimes, though, certain kinds of organizations that offered association insurance became insolvent or engaged in fraudulent activities and left policyholders with few options. When the former President Barack Obama...
David Mitchell is a man with a mission. He is determined to stitch together a movement that will finally smash the power of the pharmaceutical industry and bring pocketbook relief to millions of Americans who need expensive drugs. Mitchell, a 68-year-old former Washington communications executive, was diagnosed eight years ago with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. Until recently, the disease has been held in check by drugs costing $325,000 a year. Medicare and a good Medigap policy have covered most of the expense. In 2016...
Not long ago, the news site ProPublica published an important story about employers who, in their quest for a younger and cheaper workforce, were pushing out “older” workers – often those in their early 50s. Crunching data from the Urban Institute, reporters found that 28 percent of stable, longtime employees sustain at least one damaging layoff between turning 50 and leaving the workforce for retirement. While the story was about the financial impacts on laid-off workers’ savings and retirement, it was also about a lot more....
The Food and Drug Administration just announced it would once again try to regulate tobacco products. This time the target of the agency’s regulatory hand is what it believes is the growing menace of flavored e-cigarettes and other tobacco products used by young people who’ve turned to vaping and smoking. The FDA said about 3.6 million children under age 18 now admit they use e-cigarettes. That’s an alarming number and is worrisome because FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said that almost all current smokers started when...
It’s open enrollment time for medical insurance, and for people having to shop in the individual insurance market, the choices are as confusing as ever. Television ads splashed over the airwaves as the midterm electioneering came to a close didn’t help much. By the end of the campaign it was hard to find any candidate – Democrat or Republican – who didn’t want to cover people with preexisting health conditions. The devil was in the details, though, and how politicians suggested people should be covered remained mostly a...
Karen R., a 70-year-old Medicare beneficiary living in a midsize town in Indiana, contacted me recently about her Part D drug coverage. She and her husband both have traditional Medicare, a Medigap policy and what’s called a stand-alone plan for their drugs. For a long time, her stand-alone plan offered through Humana worked well for them. Her out-of-pocket costs for most drugs was only $8. This summer Karen, who takes 11 drugs for a variety of illnesses, including atrial fibrillation and kidney disease, was diagnosed with a...
Making decisions about Medicare coverage has never been easy. Over the years the task has become more complicated as congress has moved to privatize the system. Open enrollment, the time for evaluating coverage and making changes, opens Oct. 15 and runs through Dec. 7 this year. This is the first of two columns that address decisions people about to become eligible for Medicare and those already on the program will have to make. While some 57 million people are still in traditional Medicare, which remains a social insurance p...
Having good insurance doesn’t always mean that a patient won’t be caught with a huge surprise medical bill they didn’t expect and don’t know where to turn. But politics and self-interest on the part of insurers and health care providers have gotten in the way of a workable solution. Such bills result when someone goes to the emergency room and the physicians treating them – primarily ER doctors, anesthesiologists and radiologists – don’t belong to a patient’s insurer’s network of providers. In other words, those providers a...
Anyone buying health insurance this fall faces a daunting task: having to choose among multiple, often-complex options that offer widely varying degrees of protection. For starters, association health plans are back, allowing small businesses to band together to buy insurance. So are the short-term policies that may last from only a few months to a year. Then there are plans offered by church ministries that look like insurance but really aren’t. Plus, multiple and complex options remain from the Affordable Care Act. And t...
“Lowering Your Blood Pressure Could Stave Off Dementia,” heralded the headline from Bloomberg, which was not alone in delivering the “good” news. Time advised, “There May Finally Be Something You Can Do to Lower Your Risk of Dementia.” Reuters’ headline was even more definitive. “Lowering Blood Pressure Cuts Risk of Memory Decline: US Study.” Readers can be forgiven if they rushed to their doctors to discuss more aggressive blood pressure treatment. Who wouldn’t want to escape the scourge of dementia? But alas, most of the n...
A new health insurance option awaits consumers this fall. Proponents have said it will offer lower premiums and relief from increasingly expensive “Obamacare” policies sold in the so-called individual market. That’s the place where people who don’t have employer or government-sponsored insurance turn when they need coverage. It’s no secret that rising premiums have hurt people in that market if they are among those whom the law considers too wealthy for subsidies to help them out – for example, families of four with income...
Is Medicare going broke? That scary thought raced through the media a few weeks ago when the program’s trustees issued their annual report to Congress. The media reported the “news” in its predictable fashion; painting a bleak picture of the program some 59 million older and disabled Americans depend on for their health care. Every year the media fail to give the full or nuanced picture of what’s happening, instead opting for dramatic headlines announcing the program is broke. This year is no different. “Medicare is not go...
The headline in the Wall Street Journal seemed to sum up the president’s plans for dealing with America’s high drug prices. “Drug Industry Relieved By Price Proposal,” it read and described the president’s blueprint as falling short of “more far-reaching ideas.” Since the plan contained no major threat to the status quo, it’s no wonder it boosted pharmaceutical stocks. In other words, the plan continued the current system under which the government does not negotiate the prices it pays for medicines under the Medicare progra...
Rural Health News Service When you fill a prescription at your local pharmacy, you assume the medicine you receive is safe and won’t interact badly with other drugs you’re taking. That’s not an unreasonable assumption, considering that pharmacists enjoy a positive reputation among the public. A recent Gallup poll found that pharmacists are among the most trusted professionals ranking second only to nurses. But pharmacists’ reputations as patient guardians may be unwarranted. The results of an investigation published by the Ch...
Rural Health News Service Anyone facing a hospital stay for themselves or a family member should look at new data the government released right before Christmas showing that it penalized 769 of the nation’s hospitals for having high rates of patient injuries. The monetary penalties – a reduction for the year in their reimbursement for treating Medicare patients – do bite. Larger teaching hospitals could lose as much as $1 million or more. This is the third year the government has penalized hospitals in an effort to prevent av...
