Charles Ornstein Posts

In a major departure from industry practice, GlaxoSmithKline, the sixth-largest global drug maker, announced Tuesday that it will no longer hire doctors to promote its drugs. The company also will stop tying compensation for sales representatives to the number of prescriptions written for drugs they market. Glaxo’s move is more evolutionary than revolutionary, the last step in a dramatic reduction in its spending on physician speakers in recent years. Some competitors have shown no signs of letting up.

With open enrollment for 2014 drawing to a close this Saturday, there’s little time for delay for 36 million Medicare patients to choose a drug plan. Even those happy with their plan from last year need to re-evaluate dozens of choices, as changing costs can double or even triple a person's annual prescription costs.

This week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is expected to announce the long-awaited enrollment numbers for the first month of the health insurance marketplaces. And from all reports, they’re going to be low. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the 36 states that rely on Healthcare.gov for their insurance marketplaces signed up fewer than 50,000 people in their first month of operation.

Insurance companies using shady practices to remove policy holders during the ACA's transition period have received serious blowback from consumers. Lawsuits in several cases have forced the companies to halt the cancellation notices and review their practices.

This weekend brought more than a modicum of clarity to what happened behind the scenes in the run-up to the Oct. 1 launch of Healthcare.gov. Two stories in particular dissected failures by the Obama administration in fear or Republican retribution and, respectively, how GOP obstructionism ensured the site's failure. In both cases, it's politics over policy.

Most-often mentioned state at today’s House committee grilling of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius? So far, it’s the secretary’s home state of Kansas. “We're not in Kansas anymore. Some might say we are in Wizard of Oz land,” Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said to Sebelius during one contentious exchange about her agency’s troubled rollout of Healthcare.gov. So how is the rollout going in Kansas?

Over the weekend, two very different takes on the three-week-old HealthCare.gov health insurance marketplace hit the newsstand. One saw the glitchy website as a glass half full, while the other only saw the leaky mess that tech-heavy Internet launches sometimes succumb to.

Since the federal health insurance exchange has launched, top federal officials have told interviewers that they do not know how many people have been able to enroll using the healthcare.gov website. However, facts and figures are being released on a state level that show what true transparency looks like.

Long after power is restored from Sandy, the effect of another more-precarious outage is still taking shape: Some of the largest hospitals in lower Manhattan remain shuttered. Other hospitals are scrambling to fill the gap, and concern is rising that the patchwork system can't last for long.

Today, we are refreshing our Nursing Home Inspect app to include thousands more deficiencies found by government inspectors in nursing homes around the country.

Our tool, based on data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has already led to an impressive array of news stories.