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President Trump tweets criticising the NHS: The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!Jeremy Hunt hits back: I may disagree with claims made on that march but not ONE of them wants to live in a system where 28m people have no cover. NHS may have challenges but I’m proud to be from the country that invented universal coverage - where all get care no matter the...

Nine states are considering laws that would require their residents to purchase health insurance, the The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. The proposals come less than two months after Republicans, as part of a sweeping tax code overhaul, voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) mandate requiring individuals to have health insurance.  Lawmakers in Maryland are considering a law requiring residents to buy health insurance. California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia, are also considering similar proposals, according to the Journal report.  The ACA's individual mandate was implemented...

"The number of immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) on Medicaid grew twice as fast as the number of natives and their children on Medicaid from 2011 to 2013 — 11 percent vs. 5 percent. About two-thirds of the growth in Medicaid associated with immigrants was among immigrants themselves, rather than the U.S.-born children of immigrants. The increase in Medicaid enrollment among immigrants and their children can be roughly estimated as costing $4.6 billion annually. By 2013, 25 percent of immigrants and their children were on Medicaid, compared to 16 percent of natives and their children.”

A group of campaigners, including Prof Stephen Hawking, has been given permission to challenge a government health policy in the High Court. They will pursue a judicial review against Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and NHS England over plans to create accountable care organisations (ACOs). These are to act as partnership bodies incorporating hospitals, community services and councils. Campaigners say it risks privatisation, but this is denied by ministers. 'Radical changes' NHS England wants hospitals and other trusts to work closely with GPs and social care services to look after more patients in their communities rather than in hospital. In some...

Health care costs are "a hungry tapeworm on the American economy," Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett says, and now his firm is teaming up with Amazon and JPMorgan Chase to create a new company with the goal of providing high quality health care for their employees at a lower cost. The new company will be "free from profit-making incentives and constraints" as it tries to find ways to cut costs and boost satisfaction with the health care plan for employees of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. The trio unveiled their new venture in a news release. "The...

WASHINGTON — Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will create an independent health care company that is “free from profit-making incentives” that will aim to reduce healthcare costs for their U.S. workers. The focus of the company will be technology solutions “that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost,” a news release says. “The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy. Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable. Rather, we...

It's said that time heals all wounds. But not for people afflicted with dementia like Gerda Noack. The 93-year-old German woman's memory is fading, as is her eyesight. The losses scare her. On a recent morning at the AlexA Residence for Senior Citizens in Dresden, where she lives, Noack sounded anxious as she asked, over and over: "Where am I supposed to go?" Director Gunter Wolfram gently took her arm and suggested they visit a government-run store from the former communist East Germany called Intershop. The once popular chain no longer exists — but a mockup of the store is...

Don’t look now, but the President and Congressional Republicans are making progress on their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare with a more affordable, flexible, and dynamic health system. This news will likely come as a surprise. As far as the news media is concerned, the failure to pass the American Health Care Act in the Senate means that health care has been a zone of failure for the President. What they have missed is an administration-wide health reform effort, enhanced by congressional action, that will lower costs, increase access, and improve health outcomes. Because this new strategy doesn’t fit...

<p>Idaho officials said they will begin allowing insurers to sell new plans that don't meet requirements set by the Affordable Care Act, a move that will test the limits of states' ability to carve out their own health-insurance rules.</p> <p>Wednesday, the Idaho Department of Insurance said it would allow insurers in the state to begin offering "state-based plans" to consumers. These products could leave out some of the benefits mandated by the ACA for individual coverage. Insurers would be able to consider enrollees' medical history in setting their premiums, a practice known as underwriting, which isn't authorized under the ACA. The new state-based plans could also include dollar limits on total benefit payouts, which the ACA banned.</p>

Anyone over the age of 30 has lived through a rather profound shift in federal priorities. A half-century ago, defense accounted for 45 percent of federal outlays at $405 billion. Medicare and health, combining for $45 billion, constituted five percent of the budget. Granted, the budget disparity occurred at the peak of the Vietnam War. But a review of federal budgets during non-war postwar years generally shows defense dwarfing health-related expenses. The entity eating up the largest portion of the federal budget remains the well-fed Department of Health and Human Services, which devours roughly $1.1 trillion. Social Security ($1 trillion),...

If there is a different place to post this, please direct me. My Medicare begins Feb. 2, and I'm figuring to sign up for an advantage plan, but my lazy self hasn't done enough research on this. Those of you in the know, any advice is appreciated. 65, male, caucasian, 5'7", 180-195 lbs., reside in Florida, no wife or ex-wife, no children, travel to Hawaii, drive to NY and California, spry, no medications, no chronic ailments other than mild sciatica, good mobility, no arthritis, drink daily (after 6 PM), SS + pension + other ~ 3000/month, cash reserves about $150k,...

A former pharmaceutical industry official who says drug prices are too high will now be in charge of buying more medications than anyone in the world. Alex Azar, former president of the U.S. arm of Eli Lilly & Co., was confirmed Wednesday as the secretary of health and human services. In that role, he'll oversee the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates prescription drugs including those produced by his former employer. He'll also oversee Medicare and Medicaid, which together spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on prescription medications. He'll take over the agency at a time when rising...

PowerPost Follow @powerpost PowerPost Analysis The Health 202: NIH wants 1 million Americans to contribute to new pool of gene data By Paige Winfield Cunningham January 16 THE PROGNOSIS Starting this spring, Americans across the country will be invited to contribute to a massive new pool of genomic information being assembled by the government, a project that represents the most ambitious effort yet to capitalize on the promising new frontier of gene-based medicine. Three years after the National Institutes of Health first announced its Precision Medicine Initiative — subsequently redubbed “All of Us” — the agency’s director, Francis Collins, says...

Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton will close by the end of 2018. Premier Health announced on Wednesday that the hospital, based on the northwest side of Dayton, will shut down by the end of 2018. The health network — the largest private employer in the region — said the closure is “part of Premier Health’s new strategic plan.” Here’s what we know about the closure now: MAKING A DECISION: Mary Garman, chief operating officer at Good Sam, said there were several options that were looked at before the decision was made to close the Dayton hospital. She said company executives...

The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham was a guest on the Wednesday edition of FBN’s Risk and Reward and he didn’t hold back in hammering the liberal media’s persistence that President Trump as mentally ill, telling host Liz MacDonald that they’re no more than “crazy” “Democratic Party hacks.” Graham replied that the NewsBusters newsroom thought the White House press corps’s behavior “was crazy,” adding that “Jeff Flake picked the wrong day to give this speech” comparing Trump to Joseph Stalin “after the press just embarrassed themselves by all asking...a battery of questions refusing to accept the idea that Donald Trump...

For almost an hour on Tuesday, the White House press corps stooped to a new low of embarrassment and clownishly liberal behavior, lobbing over a dozen questions at Navy Rear Admiral Dr. Ronny Jackson to insinuate that President Trump must be mentally ill to the point of AlzheimerÂ’s Disease. This was all despite JacksonÂ’s insistence that heÂ’s in great health. Whether it was Bloomberg, CBS News Radio, CNN, or The Washington Post, the long knives were out as the liberal media engaged in their own PickettÂ’s Charge to save their narrative that TrumpÂ’s mentally ill and thus must be removed...

2018 has barely finished dawning, and already, the pharmaceutical industry once more has egg on its face from outrageous price hikes. This time, the culprit is pharmaceutical startup NextSource, which apparently has taken a 40-year-old cancer drug known as lomustine, and ruthlessly hiked its price from $50/pill in 2013, to $768/pill now. In other words, they’ve raised the price of the drug by over 1400% over the past five years. NextSource’s defense for why this has happened has to be read to be believed. CBS News reports that the company’s CEO, Robert DiCrisci, claims that the company set the price based on the...

Overnight, Imamu Baraka was walking past a Baltimore hospital when he noticed something he says he'll never forget. The hospital's security guards had just wheeled a patient to a bus stop, and in the freezing temperatures they left her there. The only thing she had on was a hospital gown. "It's about 30 degrees out here right now," Baraka says in a recording of the encounter. "Are you OK, ma'am? Do you need me to call the police?" he asks.

In the American labor market, services are the new steel.This moment was inevitable. It just wasn’t supposed to happen so soon. Due to the inexorable aging of the country—and equally unstoppable growth in medical spending—it was long obvious that health-care jobs would slowly take up more and more of the economy. But in the last quarter, for the first time in history, health care has surpassed manufacturing and retail, the most significant job engines of the 20th century, to become the largest source of jobs in the U.S. In 2000, there were 7 million more workers in manufacturing than in...

The number of new HIV/AIDS cases is on the rise in Russia, with less than half of the 900,000 HIV-positive people receiving treatment. The movement denying the deadly disease’s very existence is gathering pace too. Although the number of newly-diagnosed and AIDS-related deaths continue shrinking worldwide, the opposite is happening in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with Russia accounting for almost two thirds of new contractions in the region. "For quite a long while, for five years, not nearly enough attention has been paid to the HIV/AIDS issue. There has not been enough funding,” director of the Federal HIV Research...