Health Care

Original Cheerios goes GMO-free because of consumer demand. Let's hope this is the wave of the future. Other flavors will continue using GMOs.

Study shows how Medicaid fails the poor and Obamacare will fail the middle class.

"The research examines emergency room records for roughly 25,000 people over 18 months. It found that adults who are covered by Medicaid use emergency rooms 40% more than those in similar circumstances who do not have health insurance. Having Medicaid consistently increased visits to the ER across a range of demographic groups, types of visits, and medical conditions, including types of conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary-care situations. The authors said that in no case were they able to find any subpopulations, or conditions, for which Medicaid caused a noteworthy decrease in ER use."

This doesn't surprise me.

"There’s now a voluminous body of clinical literature showing that access to Medicaid alone doesn’t improve (and can worsen) medical outcomes. Boosters of Medicaid dismiss much of this literature, arguing that the research can’t control for all the socioeconomic factors that contribute to bad medical outcomes among the poor. But the sheer volume of literature is becoming hard to ignore. So are the results of the latest study of ER visits."

That doesn't surprise me either.

"Medicaid patients are being relegated to third-rate clinics and long wait lines, if they can access care at all. It’s especially true when it comes to outpatient specialty care.
Obamacare follows a similar model. It promises a rich set of paper benefits, but relies on diminishing reimbursement rates to make the economics work. The narrow doctor networks found in Obamacare, and closed drug formularies, are the result of this construct. It’s a design feature of the underfunded promises that Obamacare makes, just like it has become a design feature of Medicaid. Health plans narrow provider networks to make the mandated benefits remotely affordable. In this way, Obamacare is going to inevitably fail the middle class in the same manner that Medicaid has failed the poor."

That's not the only way it's going to fail.

Obamacare confusion.

Entrepreneur creates prescription health care app. 

Supposedly cured HIV patients relapse.