national health program

(Physicians for a National Health Program) A new study by Harvard Medical School researchers in the Annals of Emergency Medicine finds that access to outpatient psychiatric care in the greater Boston area is severely limited, even for people with reputedly excellent private health insurance.

Given that the federal health law is modeled after the Massachusetts health reform, the findings have national implications, the researchers say.

(Physicians for a National Health Program) A new survey of hospice care in the US says that the rapidly growing role of for-profit companies in providing end-of-life care for terminally ill patients raises serious concerns about whose interests are being served under such a commercial arrangement: those of shareholders or those of dying patients and their loved ones.

For-profit hospices' marketing practices, their gaming of the Medicare system, and their lower pay for less-skilled staff raise ethical and quality concerns.

(Physicians for a National Health Program) The increased computerization in US hospitals hasn't made them cheaper or more efficient, Harvard researchers say, although it may have modestly improved the quality of care for heart attacks.

The findings contradict claims by President Obama and many lawmakers that health information technology, including electronic medical records, will save billions and help make reform affordable.

The study uses data from the most extensive survey ever undertaken of hospital computerization.

(Physicians for a National Health Program) A new study shows uninsured American adults with chronic illnesses like diabetes, high cholesterol or hypertension often go undiagnosed and undertreated, leading to an increased risk of costly, disabling and even lethal complications of their disease.

The researchers, based at Harvard Medical School and the affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance, analyzed data on 15,976 US non-elderly adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2006.

(Physicians for a National Health Program) A major new statistical review of 82 individual research studies has revealed that nonprofit nursing homes deliver, on average, higher quality care than for-profit nursing homes.

The authors' meta-analysis shows that nonprofit facilities delivered higher quality care than for-profit facilities for two of the four most frequently reported quality measures: more or higher quality staffing and less prevalence of pressure ulcers, sometimes called bedsores.

(Physicians for a National Health Program) A new study by two Harvard researchers has found that taxing job-based health benefits would heavily penalize insured, working families.

(Physicians for a National Health Program) Medical problems contributed to nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the August issue of the American Journal of Medicine that will be published online Thursday.

The data were collected prior to the current economic downturn and hence likely understate the current burden of financial suffering.

Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6 percent.