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Millions of people facing the cancellation of health insurance policies will be allowed to buy catastrophic coverage and will be exempt from penalties if they go without insurance next year, the White House said Thursday night.

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) might have their year in 2014, if recent survey findings are suggestive of future trends.

City of New Orleans Health Commissioner Dr. Karen DeSalvo has been named as HHS' new national coordinator for health information technology. She starts Jan. 13.

The director of Minnesota's health insurance exchange, April Todd-Malmlov, abruptly resigned this week, making the exchange the fourth state program to see a leadership change in the midst of mounting criticism over the rollout of President Obama's new health care law.

During the first eight months of this year, fewer than 18 percent of Medicare patients ended up back in the hospital within a month of discharge, the lowest rate in years, the government reported Friday.

One of the central features of a value-based system is a financial "stick." If patients insist on medical procedures that science shows to be ineffective or unnecessary, they'll have to pay for all or most of the cost.

The long-awaited update to guidelines for the management of hypertension - from the panel appointed to the Eighth Joint National Committee (JNC 8) - raises the recommended blood pressure threshold to determine the need for drug therapy in many patients.

A collaborative effort is under way to enroll millions of young and healthy Americans into health plans that are available in the federal and state insurance exchanges. As the enrollment deadline approaches, many individuals aged 19 to 29 years remain unfamiliar with the health reform policy changes. Their participation is imperative to keeping premiums affordable for the higher-risk pool of consumers.

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.