Lifestyle

If you're strapped for cash come April 15, you can use your credit card to pay your 2007 tax bill and to pay estimated taxes for 2008, but you'll pay dearly for the privilege. The company that

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When a pharmacy gets hit with a malpractice claim, it often settles quickly—and demands silence in return. If only physicians were so lucky? According to plaintiff attorneys, the majority of...

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Physicians are accustomed to poking and probing. They do it routinely as part of a better understanding of their patients’ health status. Of course, in those situations, it’s the doctor who does the probing.

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Back in medical school, we were all taught not to discuss in public potentially sensitive details about the patients under our care.

Slow pay and no pay. Those are two of the most common complaints that doctors have about insurance carriers. They take too long to pay, they bounce too many claims back to be resubmitted, and they deny claims that doctors think should be paid. But some health insurers do a better job than others.

Medication, education, plus a dose of lifestyle changes like diet and exercise. That is pretty much the standard treatment for hypertension. But a recent study published in JAMA shows that patients with uncontrolled high blood pressure can do better with blood pressure self-monitoring and regular contact with a healthcare provider through the Internet—and they do it with fewer doctor visits.

Physicians see the need [to keep people healthy], more than anybody. And physicians are in the prime position to see that this need is met, because they are altruistic by nature.

Prescription drug abuse is a growing concern among healthcare and law enforcement officials, as more addicts get their high from legal drugs. Two recent events pinpoint both sides of the problem. In Florida, a report from the Florida Medical Examiners Commission revealed that three times as many Floridians died from abuse of prescription drugs as those who overdosed on illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin.

“I’m not sure if a lot of the phenomenality of [the growth] is due to recognition more than explosive, exponential growth,” says Lou Ellen Horwitz, executive director of the Chicago-based Urgent Care Association of America. “Definitely, there is growth. We probably see a new one opening up every week. But prior to people paying attention, there may have been one opening every other week, but it wasn’t on the radar.”

A US District Court judge in New Jersey has approved a $255 million settlement in a class-action suit that involved members of California-based Health Net who used out-of-network physicians. The suit alleged that members who received care from out-of-network doctors and healthcare facilities got less money than they should have because the health insurer used an “invalid” database to determine reimbursement amounts. Under the settlement, Health Net will pay $215 million to the plaintiffs and make another $40 million worth of business practice changes.

Webster’s dictionary defines ‘integration’ as “an act or instance of combining into an integral whole.” As the sports world has taught us many times over, the “whole” is often greater than the sum of the parts. It’s a simple concept, whether we’re talking sports or business. And yet when it comes to integrating healthcare services, there has been resistance to recognizing the inherent benefits.

According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 7% of Americans surveyed said that they or someone in their household had married within the past year to get access to their spouse�s health insurance policy. Unlike a �green card� marriage, however, where two strangers marry so that one can stay in the country legally, health insurance unions are mostly between two people who have been in a long-term relationship. Many never intended to marry or didn�t plan on getting married so soon, until health circumstances made marriage an almost inevitable fiscal choice.