Health, Fitness and Style

In our mailbox today from Medicare: "Not sure if Medicare will cover your medical test or service? Medicare’s free “What’s covered” app delivers accurate cost and coverage information right on your smartphone. Now you can quickly see whether Medicare covers your service in the doctor’s office, the hospital, or anywhere else you use your phone... If you have or make a personalized account at MyMedicare.gov, and you’ve gotten your new Medicare card in the mail, you can go online anytime to log in and view or print a copy of your card. No more waiting for a replacement in the mail if your Medicare card takes an unexpected turn through the rinse cycle!" more »

Claims costs generally grew from 2014 to 2017, but selected issuers sometimes experienced wide swings in costs from year to year. Most issuers attributed the volatility in costs, in part, to large changes in the number and health of enrollees each year. Average monthly claims costs varied significantly across issuers in the same state. For selected issuers, differences in per member per month claims costs within a given state were often more than $100 — significant given that median per member per month claims costs were about $300. Selected issuers also varied significantly in their decisions to expand or reduce their participation in the exchanges and make changes to premiums and plan design. more »

"Being a racial minority is usually equated with being poor, and so it’s assumed that black middle-class women should be fine because they’re not poor. But they’re not fine. They face substantial health challenges and differences in health outcomes. My work points to the persistence of racial discrimination across class, resulting in lower life expectancy and higher rates of infant mortality, and also highlights the unique challenges women in general and black women in particular face trying to be taken seriously and get their needs met by their doctors." Author Tina Sacks more »

"Foreign doctors have all kinds of different forms of training. But many are united by one common factor that seems to be operative especially in the Commonwealth countries — a great emphasis on the bedside exam and on clinical skills. In part, [this approach] was driven by the lack of ready access to all the kinds of sophisticated testing that we have now. But I think that kind of clinical training still serves me very well. It’s almost embarrassing to see how little emphasis we put on that here where the most glaring finding, one that could have been discovered by either a good history or by a discerning exam, instead requires this $2,000 MRI and interpretation to discover something that was really there for everyone to see and recognize had they only learned how to do that." more »