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Former Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene will take over as the top official overseeing the rescue effort for the troubled HealthCare.gov online insurance marketplace.

Since 1992 Medicare has reimbursed physicians on a fee-for-service basis. In 1997, as medical costs escalated, Congress began using a Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula to reduce reimbursements if overall physician spending exceeded the growth in the economy.

In America's health-care dialogue, emergency rooms have come to symbolize the system's economic and medical defects.

In an effort to avoid a coverage gap in health insurance, those covered under the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) will get until January 2014 to enroll into a new plan through the state or federal healthcare exchange website.

When you are waiting for results from a medical test like a cancer biopsy, that call from your doctor can't come fast enough. As a doctor, I am sometimes so buried in an avalanche of medical records that it can delay decisions about what to do next.

To keep premium prices down for individuals and small businesses buying coverage through new online marketplaces, insurers have created smaller networks of hospitals. But consumers and policy experts have wondered, just how small?

Access is an important component of the Triple Aim (cost, quality, access), and it has also been stressed as a significant factor in health reform initiatives. As the influx of uninsured increasingly seeks care, and if the number of providers available to provide primary care decreases as projected, achieving access to quality and cost-effective care may become more problematic.

Enrollment in new Obamacare exchanges may be lagging, but experts said Thursday that the health law's massive expansion of Medicaid could place more than 8 million low-income people in the program before the first year is up.

About 85,000 people with a history of serious illnesses, who are enrolled in high-risk insurance pools created under the health care law, will get a month's reprieve before they lose that coverage.

A new study by researchers at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and McGill University in Montreal reveals that the United States health care system ranks 22nd out of 27 high-income nations when analyzed for its efficiency of turning dollars spent into extending lives.

The House of Representatives passed a 3-month patch late Thursday to stabilize physicians' Medicare payments -- delaying dramatic cuts scheduled for 2014 -- while Congress works on a permanent repeal of Medicare's sustainable growth rate (SGR) payment formula.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that Stage 2 of the EHR Meaningful Use program would be extended through 2016, especially as many healthcare CIOs continue to struggle with health IT tool vendors. This also means that Stage 3 will be delayed until 2017.

Almost half of 206 hospital executives polled in a recent survey said they do not intend to use an accountable care organization (ACO)-like model in their health systems. Only 20% of those polled currently participate in an ACO.

The bipartisan budget deal reached this week could drag out efforts to overhaul Medicare's payment formula for physicians as lawmakers pursue a short-term fix and attempt to extend and make other tweaks to Medicare provisions, including significant changes to reimbursement for long-term acute care.

The global death toll from cancer rose to 8.2 million in 2012 with sharp rises in breast cancer as the disease tightened its grip in developing nations struggling to treat an illness driven by Western lifestyles.

Congress' work to reshape physician payments under Medicare and repeal the sustainable growth rate (SGR) payment formula took several pivotal steps this week.

Several months ago, Kathleen Sebelius, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, was asked what success would look like for the state and federal healthcare exchanges. Her response to NBC News was, Well, I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014. Now, with only an estimated 365,000 having become newly insured through the exchanges to date, some are concerned about meeting enrollment expectations.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey said Tuesday it won't renew any of its 2013 policies for individuals and small-business owners after the end of the year because it would be next to impossible to undo the work it has put in preparing for Obamacare.

More than 100,000 individuals selected a private insurance plan through the federal online marketplace in November, HHS announced Wednesday. That's roughly four times the enrollment total during October, when the HealthCare.gov website was largely dysfunctional. But it was far short of the levels needed to meet the Obama administration's projection of 3.3 million enrollees by Dec. 31.

In the battle to control costs and out-of-pocket expenses for consumers, it would seem logical that doctors would choose the lower-cost drug. However, a report found that when given the choice, doctors chose the more expensive eye medicine over a lower cost option, even when both prescriptions provided the same effective treatment.

The federal health care exchange is incorrectly determining that some people are eligible for Medicaid when they clearly are not, leaving them with little chance to get the subsidized insurance they are entitled to as the Dec. 23 deadline for enrollment approaches.

Competition over healthcare prices and quality is coming. Transparency and the radical redesign of health insurance benefits will be its handmaiden. Companies such as General Electric are leading the way.

States' refusal to expand their Medicaid programs could cost billions of dollars over the next 10 years, and those costs are staggering.

In a decision that could have national implications, a federal judge in Connecticut temporarily blocked UnitedHealthcare late Thursday from dropping an estimated 2,200 physicians from its Medicare Advantage plan in that state.

Thousands of hospitals, large and small, are girding for cuts to their Medicare payments in 2014, as federal pay-for-performance programs aimed at boosting clinical quality, improving patient experience and preventing unnecessary hospital readmissions roll into their second year.

The downward trend in preventable hospital readmissions that began in 2012 has continued well into this year, according to data published Friday on the CMS' blog. Quality experts were impressed but had questions.

The CMS is giving providers another year to show they've met the Stage 2 criteria of the federal government's incentive program to encourage the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records. That means the start of the next phase will be pushed back a year.

Reference prices, a health benefit strategy that requires patients to pay costs above a set price, may save employers and patients money, but their potential may be limited-perhaps even more so under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

As policymakers start designing the third phase of Meaningful Use, eight healthcare and IT groups are asking the ONC's Health IT Policy Committee to commit to including patient-generated health data in the requirements.

The Affordable Care Act has dramatically increased the cost of buying a health insurance plan on the individual market in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Georgia, and North Carolina, states that account for more than half of America's uninsured adults.