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Amazon announced its number of Prime customers for the first time last week. The online retailer counts 100 million of them — who, excluding students and others affiliated with educational institutions, each pay $99 — around the globe to subscribe. Sixty-seven million of these Prime customers live in the United States. A majority of U.S. households voluntarily joined this exclusive club, which, the numbers indicate, is not very exclusive. Members benefit from discounts, streaming television, movies, and music, expedited shipping, and other perks. Might Amazon soon offer health insurance coverage to Prime subscribers? The company, as CNBC reports, already sells...

A recent survey conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 51 percent of U.S. adults support single-payer health care. This isn’t a poll of actual voters, of course, but it does suggest that the propaganda campaign conducted by the Democrats and the “news” media is having an effect. The system they most often hold up as a paragon of the single-payer approach to health care is, of course, Canada’s “Medicare” program. But, before deciding to emulate the Canucks, we should consider what they really pay for health care and what they get for their money....

Here are three ways to fix it. Medicaid was intended to be a safety net for the truly needy. But over time, both federal and state policymakers have lost sight of Medicaid’s core purpose and turned the program into a catch-all, open-ended welfare program for non-disabled adults.Obamacare made this problem even worse, giving states the option to expand Medicaid to even more able-bodied adults. Nearly 13 million have been added since that expansion went live in 2014. Today, able-bodied adults in the program now outnumber individuals with disabilities — the people Medicaid was largely designed to serve — by a...

Liberals are staunch promoters of mandatory, single-payer health-care insurance. Yet, they are firmly opposed to the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. This is complete hypocrisy. The first line of defense of your life is not health insurance. It is the right to keep and bear arms. Nothing quite protects the health and well-being of you and your loved ones like "packing heat." It is the first line of defense in insuring the health of you and your family. Health insurance is all well and good, but it won't stop a stark-raving lunatic from harming you...

Facebook was in talks with top hospitals and other medical groups as recently as last month about a proposal to share data about the social networks of their most vulnerable patients. The idea was to build profiles of people that included their medical conditions, information that health systems have, as well as social and economic factors gleaned from Facebook. Facebook said the project is on hiatus so it can focus on "other important work, including doing a better job of protecting people's data."

PHILADELPHIA – The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Hospital, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, and Chester County Hospital were announced among the 2018 class of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation’s “Leaders in LGBT Healthcare Equality Index 2018.” The HRC Foundation is the educational arm of the country’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization. The Healthcare Equality Leaders were selected based on an annual survey identifying healthcare institutions that lead in efforts to offer equitable and inclusive care for LGBT patients by evaluating policies and practices related to LGBT patients and visitors, such as patient...

Junior Rodríguez is used to seeing death and violence up close because he's a doctor in a public hospital in Venezuela, one of the world's most dangerous countries. But the violence has been turning more personal for Rodríguez and the rest of the medical staff at the Dr. Luis Razetti de Barcelona University Hospital in the eastern state of Anzoátegui. The staffers work under constant death threats made by relatives or friends of patients — some of them dangerous gang members — if the patients die.

New York City had 613 verified cases of tuberculosis (TB) in 2017, up 10% from 556 the year before, the largest spike in 26 years, according to a new report by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The department said it was the first increase since 2003 and the largest rise since 1992, but offered no specific explanation. However, the department stated in a press release announcing the increase that the city's budget to fight and treat tuberculosis has been cut in half in the past decade. 14 Patients Have Multidrug-Resistant TB Fourteen of the 613 patients had...

Abortion proponents on Monday made clear their displeasure with the Trump administration’s proposed conscience protections for healthcare providers, saying in effect that doctors and nurses who have religious objections to abortion should be forced to participate in the practice nonetheless. The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) proposed rule, which largely reinstates a George W. Bush-era policy that had been scuttled by the Obama administration, is founded on a number of federal laws guaranteeing that individuals and associations participating in healthcare programs receiving federal funding — a category that today encompasses the vast majority of care in the United...

Patients beware. When you’re admitted to a hospital, you’re routinely encouraged to sign a DNR, short for Do Not Resuscitate order. Don’t assume it will apply only in extreme circumstances. New research shows having those three letters — DNR — on your chart could put you on course to getting less medical and nursing care throughout your stay. Fewer MRIs and CT scans, fewer medications, even fewer bedside visits from doctors. A DNR could cost you your life. They even hesitate to put DNR patients in the ICU when they need intensive care. No wonder patients with DNRs have far...

(CNN)A survey of 104 health facilities in Venezuela, commissioned by the opposition-controlled National Assembly, paints a grim picture of a collapsed system hurting for even the most essential goods and services. According to the report, most laboratory services and hospital nutrition services are intermittent or completely inoperative. Staggering statistics highlight the shortages of items such as basic medicines, catheters, surgical supplies and infant formula. Venezuela has been in a downward spiral for years, caused by a combination of mismanagement of government funds and the plummeting price of oil. Skyrocketing inflation has created extreme shortages of food, medicine and other essentials,...

Herb Meyer would be commended by the intelligence community for his extraordinary 1983 memo predicting that America was going to win the Cold War — this at a time when virtually no one (other than Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey) thought winning was possible. Today his task remains the same. It should come as a revelation to those glued to the 24-hour news cycle that things aren’t as bad “out there” as we think. The evening news never reports the countless airplanes that land on time and unharmed, or the daily billions who walk through malls and shopping centers without...

People living with disabilities, serious illness and the frailty of old age are bracing to lose caregivers due to changes in federal immigration policy. About 59,000 Haitians live in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a humanitarian program that gave them permission to work and live here after the January 2010 earthquake devastated their country. Many work in health care, often in grueling, low-wage jobs as nursing assistants or home health aides. Now these workers’ days are numbered: The Trump administration decided to end TPS for Haitians. In Boston, the city with the third-highest Haitian population, the decision has...

After first suggesting he may veto the new budget bill passed by Congress yesterday, President Donald J. Trump signed the huge $1.3 trillion budget bill today that will fund the federal government through the rest of its fiscal 2018 year, including some big increases for health programs and money to fight the opioid crisis, flouting cuts that had been called for by the president. Trump had threatened to veto the bill because it did not include money for some of his signature requests, including a wall on the border with Mexico and a fix to the Deferred Action for Childhood...

....Algorithmic tools like the one Arkansas instituted in 2016 are everywhere from health care to law enforcement, altering lives in ways the people affected can usually only glimpse, if they know they’re being used at all. Even if the details of the algorithms are accessible, which isn’t always the case, they’re often beyond the understanding even of the people using them, raising questions about what transparency means in an automated age, and concerns about people’s ability to contest decisions made by machines. {snip} ...Arkansas has said the previous, human-based system was ripe for favoritism and arbitrary decisions. “We knew there...

Health care is perhaps Canada’s defining obsession. As a nation, we crow about it and complain about it. We deify Tommy Douglas, rage about wait times, fret over private clinics and fight campaigns on minute points of privatization. But for all the endless studies, Royal Commissions and political bloviating, it can be hard to know how much Canadians actually pay for health care, not as a nation, but as individuals. The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) believes Canada spent approximately $228 billion on health care in 2016. That’s 11.1 per cent of Canada’s entire GDP and $6,299 for every...

As more states consider expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, along comes another independent study showing increased government insurance for low-income Americans pays for itself. Take the state of Montana, which expanded Medicaid in 2016 to more than 90,000 people. A study out this month from the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research shows the expansion of Medicaid generates a half-trillion dollars a year in healthcare spending. Of that, 70%, or $350 million to $400 million, is “new money circulating in Montana’s economy.” Beginning this year, states gradually began to pick up some costs, but the...

In an ideal world, providers would be able to spend less time collecting quality data and more time actually improving the quality of care, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar said here Thursday. "We need to ensure that in the quest for information on quality, we don't have providers, payers or others spend so much time accumulating data to improve reporting that they're not actually improving quality," Azar said during a press briefing with reporters at HHS headquarters. "Let's make sure it's the information that really matters; let's have the minimal necessary reporting burden to get the job...

President Trump made it very clear in his State of the Union Address that he wanted to address the high cost of health care, including out-of-control drug prices.  Well, what if the simple repeal of a law would generate both tens of billions of dollars in savings for the hospital supply chain (which includes the Medicare and Medicaid programs) while promoting free-market competition for the drug and medical supply marketplace at the same time? Does such an opportunity truly exist? It does, and it starts and ends with repealing the Medicare Anti-Kickback Safe Harbor Statute, which would level the hospital supply...

'(Being) here is a nightmare and we feel so alone we can’t believe nobody can do anything for us'Stuart Cline, 71, in Mexico before he collapsed last week. One week after he collapsed in Mexico, Stuart Cline of London is fading fast, his family says — stranded in a foreign hospital because there are no available staffed beds in his hometown. The 71-year-old survived an initial fall that burst blood vessels in his brain. Mexican doctors even stabilized him enough to withstand an airplane flight Saturday back to Canada. But four days later, Cline is still in Mexico and his...