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he Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges. According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data. "This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power...

Consumers on Wednesday will finally get some answers about one of modern life’s most persistent mysteries: how much medical care actually costs. For the first time, the federal government will release the prices that hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures. Until now, these charges have been closely held by facilities that see a competitive advantage in shielding their fees from competitors. What the numbers reveal is a health-care system with tremendous, seemingly random variation in the costs of services. In the District, George Washington University’s average bill for a patient on a ventilator was $115,000, while Providence...

(Reuters) - Anyone wanting to live longer and cut their risk of suffering from heart disease might want to consider getting a pet.

Got a survey on behalf of my physician. Now, I've been a patient for over 25 years. But from the sound of the questioning, he is considering closing his primary care operation and going to a concierge, cash-only physician operation ("Royal Pains" style, if you're familiar with the tv show). So, if he does, he'll have the cream of the local populace, and us who rely on private insurance and Medicare will be looking for another doctor. Just another thank-you to Obama-care.

PHILADELPHIA — Take five or 10 minutes, the professor said, and write down things that you love, like, need or enjoy. Now pair up with someone you don’t know and spend 20 minutes introducing yourself. Talk about whatever you want. But don’t mention anything that you wrote down. Try going on for a half-hour without a word about the most important things in life. Imagine a full day. “It might be difficult,” said instructor Robin Brennan. “That’s what this course is about. That is just a glimpse of what it is like for somebody who is LGBT” — lesbian, gay,...

NEW DELHI: It's a rebirth for 16-year-old Pakistani girl Madiha Tariq Sheikh, who feels India is her "own country" where she underwent a successful liver transplant surgery. Madiha, who hails from Lahore, was flown to India on February 3 after she slipped into coma due to acute liver failure and underwent a liver transplant surgery at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital here. "This is my own country (India)...It has been four months now and I am missing my school. Inshallah, I will return home next week," Madiha told reporters here. Her brother Rizwan had donated a part of his liver to save...

New Delhi - Doctors going to the US for studies and then planning to settle down there will not find it easy to do so now. As per new guidelines recently finalised by the Centre, the Union Health Ministry will no longer issue them a ‘No Obligation to Return to India’ (NORI) certificate that allows them to settle in the US. The move aims to check brain drain in the medical profession in the country, said a senior Health Ministry official. He said it is ironic that while the health system in India is crippled due to the acute shortage...

**SNIP** “The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017. Not everybody is happy with the plan, however. Military personnel would see their annual Tricare premiums increase anywhere from 30 - 78 percent in the first year, followed by sharply increased premiums "ranging from 94 percent to 345 percent—more than 3 times current levels." "According to congressional assessments, a retired Army colonel...

The drugs are synthetic versions of resveratrol, found in red wine, an organic chemical believed to have an anti-aging effect, by boosting activity of a protein called SIRT1. GSK, the pharmaceutical firm, is testing them on people with particular medical conditions, namely Type II diabetes and psoriasis, a serious skin condition. David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard University, said aging might not actually be an "irreversible affliction". He said: “Now we are looking at whether there are benefits for those who are already healthy. "Things there are also looking promising. We're finding that aging isn't the irreversible affliction that...

When George W. Bush was stumping as a "compassionate conservative" in the closing days of the 2000 presidential campaign, he went to Florida and repeated a campaign promise to double the funding for the National Institutes of Health. "I will lead a medical moon shot to reach far beyond what seems possible today and discover new cures for age-old afflictions," Bush said. After he won Florida by a famously narrow margin -- and thus was elected president despite losing the nationwide popular vote -- Bush basically made good on his funding promise. In fiscal 2000, the NIH spent $15.415 billion;...

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years. Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in...

TOWSON, Md. (WJZ) — A local doctor took his own life while facing allegations he took pictures and videotaped his patients without their knowledge. Police searching his home say they found an extraordinary amount of evidence. Meghan McCorkell spoke with a patient who’s worried she’s a victim, too. Baltimore City police say they’ve contacted some of the victims but say the numbers coming forward could be huge. Police say Dr. Nikita Levy–a former OB/GYN at Johns Hopkins–took his own life inside his Towson home. It’s the same house where Baltimore City police served a search warrant. Inside they say they found...

Central NJ- My significant other bashed her hand this morning, it swelled bad and lots of pain. Went to work and it got worse, so went to the urgent care facility for an x-ray. She works for J&J and has very good insurance. When she arrived, she asked if they were able to x-ray on site, and was told yes. After filling out many pages of forms and handing over a $20 co-pay, she was taken to a room where a 'nurse' incorrectly attempted to take her blood pressure several times, tried taking her pulse with her thumb instead of...

Does a shadowy group of obscenely wealthy elitists control the world? Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes? The answer might surprise you. Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control. And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings. When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people that have a few million dollars. As you will see...

Starting in April, the practice will ask patients to pay doctors directly for their care and no longer will accept payments from insurance companies except for Medicare. "We believe that insurance companies are making it increasingly difficult to practice patient-centered medicine," the doctors in the practice wrote to patients this month. The doctors are joining the small but growing number of physicians who since the late 1990s have tried going the "direct pay" or "concierge" route, where doctors typically care for a smaller group of patients who are willing to pay for easier access to their physician. It's a trend...

In pro-gun-regulation Illinois — where politicians would rather play gun control politics than fight the murderous street gangs — a young man was admitted to the hospital. Sam Insley, 16, of Oak Lawn, wasn't admitted with a gun problem. Sam had a tonsil problem. "It was an infected tonsil," Mary Rita Insley told me of her son Sam, a strapping, 6-foot-2-inch, 195-pound lacrosse player at St. Rita High School on the Southwest Side. "Yes, he's a big kid, but regardless of his age and stature, my husband and I were with him the entire time he was there." Sam was...

Sixteen Democratic senators who voted for the Affordable Care Act are asking that one of its fundraising mechanisms, a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices scheduled to take effect January 1, be delayed.  Echoing arguments made by Republicans against Obamacare, the Democratic senators say the levy will cost jobs — in a statement Monday, Sen. Al Franken called it a “job-killing tax” — and also impair American competitiveness in the medical device field. The senators, who made the request in a letter(PDF) to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are Franken, Richard Durbin, Charles Schumer, Patty Murray, John Kerry, Kirsten Gillibrand,...

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recent recession ended in June 2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka, the fiscal stimulus bill) was passed by Congress and signed into law on February 17, 2009, by President Barack Obama for $831 billion. We know that unemployment is currently higher than the Administration’s prediction of unemployment WITHOUT the stimulus. Given over a year for the fiscal stimulus to kick-in, we see that the employment situation remains bleak. We know that more people have gone on disability than dropped off unemployment rolls since May 2010, the beginning...

Little Canada-based St. Jude Medical is eliminating 80 jobs in Minnesota as part of a restructuring plan the company announced Thursday, Aug. 30. The medical device manufacturer, which employs about 3,000 in Minnesota, said it is providing support to about 300 workers across the company whose jobs have been eliminated. St. Jude Medical competes in the market for heart devices against Fridley-based Medtronic and Natick, Mass.-based Boston Scientific, which makes pacemakers and implantable defibrillators at a division based in Arden Hills. On Wednesday, a Boston Scientific official said his company is moving forward with previously announced plans to eliminate jobs....

Palo Alto resident Ed Lee routinely negotiates for his own health care services, everything from the cost of a scan to an urgent-care visit - often securing discounts of 30 to 50 percent off the original charges. Lee,61, a self-employed public relations expert in the semiconductor industry, started bypassing his health insurance and paying out of pocket last year when he realized that premiums and deductibles were costing him more than $12,000 before his insurer paid a dime. ....Lee became part of a new breed of health care consumer - people who pay such a large portion of their health...