Guidelines derived from a recent Consensus Conference, including recommendations on the role of healthcare providers in the assurance of quality spiritual care to patients in a palliative care setting, are published in a comprehensive report in Journal of Palliative Medicine, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). Journal of Palliative Medicine is the official journal of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) and an official journal of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association (HPNA). The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/jpm
The article, “Improving the Quality of Spiritual Care as a Dimension of Palliative Care: The Report of the Consensus Conference,” represents the final Consensus Report of a conference sponsored by the Archstone Foundation of Long Beach, CA. According to Joseph F. Prevratil, JD, President and CEO, “The report’s recommendations seek to ensure that spiritual care is a fundamental component of quality palliative care, which strives to prevent and relieve suffering for seriously ill patients and their families.”
One of the health care proposals that Congress is considering, HR 3200, has created considerable rancor and much discussion. One of the more recent hot-button topics is the notion of Medicare-reimbursed end-of-life consultation, which some fear will result in the termination of medical care services in the terminally ill.
Opening a new front in the effort to promote its plans for an overhaul of the nation’s health care system, the Obama administration is courting support from Republicans and independents some distance from Capitol Hill, and aggressively publicizing the results.
Supporters Include: Tommy Thompson Richard A. Gephardt Michael R. Bloomberg Bill Frist
A bill to amend title 38, United States Code, to increase assistance for disabled veterans who are temporarily residing in housing owned by a family member, and for other purposes.
A bill to amend title 38, United States Code, to direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to provide wartime disability compensation for certain veterans with Parkinson's disease.
Democrat Charles Schumer has been a vocal advocate for the public insurance option and, more generally, among his party’s most effective public spokesmen on health care. Republican Olympia Snowe, despite considerable pressure from GOP leadership, has worked diligently to find a compromise both she and her Democratic counterparts can support in good faith. For these things, both deserve credit.
But during the Finance Committee’s hearings last week, Schumer and Snowe collaborated on a pair of amendments that could push reform in the wrong direction. Continue Reading
The biggest story in health care reform this year has not been the town hall meetings, or President Obama’s big speech on health care. It’s that the Senate Democrats have decided they’re going to pass a bill. You just haven’t heard much about this story because it’s mostly taken place behind closed doors.
1. Should we incent or require providers to prescribe patient decision aids? 2. Should we incent or require consumers to use patient decision aids?
Overtreatment is the most celebrated cause of runaway health care costs, but we shouldn’t blame the doctors. The fee-for-service system sets them up for overtreatment. First, they have been taught that offering all possible cures to every patient is good medicine. Second, malpractice law pushes them toward offering more testing and services, not less. And third, they generally get paid more when they do more. It’s hard to buck a triple-threat system like that without a little help from the patient. Fortunately, it’s not that hard for patients to provide that difference.
Patient decision aids are tools that help people participate with their doctors in key medical decisions. These aids are useful when there is more than one medically reasonable option to diagnose or treat a health problem—particularly when the options have different costs, risks, or benefits that some people might value differently than others.
This publication describes activities that OIG plans to initiate or continue with respect to the programs and operations of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the next year.
In this Work Plan, the ongoing and planned reviews are grouped into two major parts:
• “Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services” (CMS) describes reviews related to Medicare, Medicaid, information systems controls, the Childrens Health Insurance Program, and related investigations and legal counsel to OIG.
Lured by easier money and shorter prison sentences, Mafia figures and other violent criminals are increasingly moving into Medicare fraud and spilling blood over what was once a white-collar crime.
When polled at the end of September, fewer than three in ten Americans supported the health reform legislation being considered by the Senate Finance Committee. However, we also found respondents willing to engage in the health reform discussion by reading a detailed summary of the Finance Committee bill plus ten potential amendments.
In our survey, the first in which Americans were given an opportunity to “design the bill themselves,” we found that the adoption of three amendments to the Finance Committee package had the potential to significantly change public attitudes toward the bill.
Milliman consulting actuary, Robert Dobson, is out with a must read paper for those that think the "Cadillac" health plan tax makes sense.
The bottom line:
"The idea of taxing so-called Cadillac plans may not sound unreasonable upon first glance. But an actuarial view quickly reveals that the high cost of these plans has as much to do with the characteristics of the covered population as it does with benefit richness. It also reveals that the method of determining the taxable benefit threshold may create unintended consequences — especially when coupled with other benefit-level requirements under various reform proposals, leaving little room between benefit floors and the ceiling in certain slices of the insurance market."
(HealthDay News) -- A U.S. study offers more evidence that portable headphones can create magnetic interference that might make implanted defibrillators and pacemakers malfunction.
Using the headphones over the ears doesn't appear to be a problem, but storing them in a shirt or jacket pocket near the chest or allowing them to hang near the heart could spell trouble, researchers found.
(HealthDay News) -- Middle-aged people who suffer from chronic pain face some of the same limitations that much older people do, with similar challenges for mobility or making it through daily chores, a new study finds.
Researchers looked at a 2004 study that examined 18,531 participants aged 50 and older. Twenty-four percent were often troubled by moderate or severe pain, and they had much more trouble coping with physical challenges of life.
My Home Life is a new initiative aimed at improving the quality of life of those who are living, dying, visiting and working in care homes for older people.
My Home Life aims to celebrate existing best practice in care homes and promote care homes as a positive option for older people. The My Home Life team is working to help you improve the quality of life in your care home, through the development of a range of resources, events, practice development initiatives and other activities.
Each film is split into two parts: a case study and a question about the film answered by a series of experts. The films are designed to promote discussion and include a forum to allow you to add your own comments and suggestions about the issues raised by the films. Additionally, there is a worksheet available to print out to help the debate.
Policy developments strengthening primary care provide the specialty of geriatric medicine an opportunity to review and strengthen its partnership with primary care. The Department of Health has promulgated a three level model for the management of long term conditions: self management, disease management and case management for those with complex and multiple conditions. It is this latter group that geriatricians have most to offer, backed up by the evidence-based practice of comprehensive geriatric assessment.
The British Geriatrics Society Primary and Continuing Care SIG offer a model of care for frail older people, and this is intended to be useful for the effective implementation of services for such people, including case management Read More/Download Document
If you’re 20 or older and don’t have diabetes or heart disease, you can plug a handful of simple variables — things like age, cholesterol level and blood pressure — into a Framingham risk calculator and find out your chances of having serious heart trouble (a heart attack or coronary death) in the next 10 years.
Still, some 300,000 Americans die every year of sudden cardiac death outside the hospital, and many of those people don’t have classic risk factors for heart disease. Non-fatal heart attacks, too, remain difficult to predict for many patients.So there’s an understandable urge on the part of researchers to find new measures that will better predict who is at risk.
New data on health insurance coverage from the American Community Survey show extensive variation in rates of private and public coverage and uninsurance across congressional districts in the United States. Rates of private coverage are lowest in districts that have higher poverty rates which tend to be concentrated in the South and West and uninsurance remains most serious in districts with low rates of private coverage. This analysis identifies the districts in which residents would have the most to gain from health reforms that are designed to increase health insurance coverage toward a higher and more uniform national standard.
Sometime soon, maybe this week,* the Senate Finance Committee is expected to vote on the health care reform bill it spent the last two weeks debating. Inside and outside the committee, people following this process more closely than I am say the bill is likely to pass. But it's not yet a sure thing.
The committee roster is thirteen Democrats, ten Republicans. Majority vote rules. Chairman Max Baucus can afford to lose one Democrat, even if all of the committee Republicans vote against it. But if he loses two, then he needs to pick up at least one Republican.
What follows is a run-down of the five senators whose votes remain in question, based on conversations with sources over the weekend. Continue Reading
Here’s a dirty little secret: Cutting health care costs is not that difficult, nor will it harm patients. That’s because it only involves giving up unnecessary medical care—tests and treatments patients may want but really don’t need because they don’t benefit their health.
How is this supposed to happen? In Minnesota we call it “unallotment.” When the state had to reconcile a projected multibillion dollar budget deficit this year, and the Republican governor and Democratic lawmakers couldn’t agree on how to do it, the governor simply “unalloted” billions of dollars of planned expenditures. Continue Reading
Preventing and more effectively managing chronic illness are critical national health priorities. Patients with chronic disease currently account for three-quarters of overall health spending. Multiple morbidities are common: More than half of Medicare beneficiaries are treated for five or more chronic conditions yearly. Nine chronic ailments account for nearly 60% of the recent rise in Medicare spending—conditions typically treated with prescription drug therapy and managed chiefly by patients at home and in outpatient settings. Despite significant health care outlays, though, chronically ill patients receive just 55% of clinically recommended services, and that gap in care may explain a nontrivial portion of preventable morbidity and premature mortality. Continue Readng
The President has said many times this health care debate is about "health care security." But the fact is that, under the Democratic bills now being considered, many middle class families (those making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year) would not be able to afford to buy a health insurance policy even with the proposed federal government subsidies. Continue Reading
by ROBERT LASZEWSKI
It’s decision time. The Congress will or won’t pass a major health care bill during the next few weeks.Will we get health care reform in 2009?Almost certainly not. As I have been saying for months, if we get a bill it will be more a trillion dollar entitlement expansion funded by relatively minor provider cuts and about $500 billion in tax increases. That is not health care reform. Continue Reading
(HealthDay News) -- Hairstylists can do more than make their clients look good, they may also be helpful in getting some elderly people the health-care services they need, an Ohio State University study suggests.
A survey of 40 stylists in the Columbus, Ohio-area found that most develop long-term relationships with their older clients, and these seniors tend to talk freely about their troubles -- including those with family, health, depression and anxiety. Continue Reading
(HealthDay News) -- People who followed the Mediterranean diet, an eating regimen that is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and nuts, were less likely to develop depression in a Spanish study. Continue Reading
In some states, people convicted of three or more criminal acts get extra punishment after their third strike. In the Sunshine State, physicians face a so-called "three strikes and you're out" rule on medical liability judgments.
Florida voters borrowed the concept when they passed a constitutional amendment allowing doctors' licenses to be revoked if they had three medical liability judgments against them. The measure is believed to be the only one of its kind in the country. Continue Reading
In a highly unusual move, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Sept. 23 adopted 23 new amendments to a House health system reform bill that the panel already had approved two months earlier. Continue Reading
Medicare beneficiaries around the country receive significantly different amounts of health care services, according to a preliminary analysis by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Continue Reading
A federal inquiry at the behest of a key Democratic lawmaker into an insurance company's attempt to influence the health system reform debate has prompted a groundswell of criticism from GOP leaders, who likened the government's actions to a "gag order" on reform critics. Continue Reading
I receive documents of all formats on a daily basis. In many cases, these documents could easily be made much more accessible for people with disabilities with very little effort. I put together a checklist you could run through when you are done editing your document. See how much of a difference you can make in a matter of minutes. Better yet, once you get used to doing it, it will become second nature. Continue Reading
The costs of universal coverage are partly offset by later savings in Medicare. New research found that individuals who lacked health insurance at some point between the ages of 51 and 64 cost Medicare more than those who had continuous coverage in the years prior to Medicare eligibility. On average, those who were previously uninsured cost Medicare an additional $1,000 annually per person when compared with those who had been consistently covered. Had they been insured they would have likely cost Medicare less.
Earlier this year I wrote about President Obama's plans for people with disabilities. Today he announced another major step fulfilling his promise. Continue Reading
excerpts: NSW’s first academic chair in palliative care will focus on improving the quality of care delivered to the residents of aged care facilities at the end of their lives.
Professor Jane Phillips has been announced as the state’s inaugural top palliative care researcher in a move that acknowledges growing concerns about the care given to people with terminal illnesses. ...... The centre plans to create a multidisciplinary research team that will draw on the experience of palliative care patients and their families to improve the quality of care. ...... Professor Phillips will also look specifically at the needs of the people caring for family members at the end stage of life.
Her research will investigate the types of support services that are needed. Read More
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