Presdient Obama signed legislationlast month to temporarily prevent a 12.2 percent Medicare payment cut scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. The freeze lasts until Feb. 28, during which Congress is expected to come up with a permanent solution to what some consider a flawed payment system.
The otolaryngologists and pediatric surgeons who watched President Obama’s July 22 press conference must have been astonished to hear themselves vilified by the Health Care Reformer-in-Chief.
This issue’s Special Report is on quality improvement, an increasingly important health care issue not only in this country, but also in many other countries around the world.
Within the ongoing discussion on the need to reform the delivery of health care in the United States to better balance issues of cost, quality, and accessibility is an underlying issue that, if not sufficiently recognized, will undermine all efforts at reform.
In response to many national calls to enhance patient safety, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) mandated a maximum 80-hour workweek for all residents beginning in 2003.
With the crisis in the financial markets reaching what many call historic proportions, another crisis long brewing is threatening to surface that, if some experts are correct, could have even greater consequences than the financial crisis for the US health care system.
Politics is not a four-letter word.
It has been suggested that since its introduction in 1992, the term evidence-based medicine (EBM) has reached almost iconic status within the medical lexicon.
