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Dramatic progress has been made in reducing colon cancer incidence and death rates in the U.S., but concerns remain about striking racial and socio-economic disparities, according to new national statistics on colorectal cancer.

Brain scans remain "substantially overused" on patients who visit the doctor complaining of headaches and migraines, despite multiple guidelines recommending against their use. Physicians must be vigilant about having conversations with patients about the risks, neurologists say.

U.S. patients not only are spending too much on medical treatments, there are still too many ways dollar-driven health care causes harm, according to a top official with the American Cancer Society.

Participants in the federal high-risk pool created in the health law will have another month to find coverage, the Obama administration announced Friday.

The risk corridor program, a controversial provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), received $5.5 billion in federal funding on Friday.

The Obama administration is requiring health plans in Obamacare insurance marketplaces to include a more robust offering of care providers in 2015 after some early backlash over limited networks in the health care law's first year.

The Sustainable Growth Formula (SGR) Repeal and Medicare Provider Payment Modernization Act has been framed as a bipartisan solution to establishing a permanent doc fix. The only problem, it seems, is how Congress will pay for the SGR's elimination.

For many months now, the AAFP has urged family physicians to prepare for this year's Oct. 1 deadline for implementation of the ICD-10-CM code sets for outpatient diagnostic coding.

The White House has decided to reverse roughly $10 billion in cuts to the cost-sharing subsidies that were part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. That program was originally expected to be slashed by 7.3 % in fiscal 2015 and beyond as part of the sequester cuts.

Criminals are stealing patient records to commit medical identity theft. And the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made the situation worse, according to a new report from privacy and information security research firm Ponemon Institute.

Health insurance companies across the country remain wary of setting their health plan prices for the 2015 insurance exchanges due to a lack of data needed to make evidence-based decisions.

Health plans with narrow provider networks-which met with fierce backlash from patients and providers during the last go-around in the 1990s-are once again vulnerable to negative public opinion and legislative action.

Behind MNsure's upbeat facade was a swamp of management failures and technical glitches that crippled the more-than $100 million website.

While newer drugs used to treat hepatitis C virus may be more effective, they may not always be the best value option for patients. This is because the costs of emerging treatments can range from $60,000 to $80,000 per treatment course, and that cost undermines the ultimate goals of lowering healthcare costs in the US.

Members of the Health IT Policy Committee approved a set of recommendations Tuesday that will bring meaningful use Stage 3 requirements one step closer to federal approval and scale back the initial Stage 3 proposals by 33%.

Under pressure from the industry and Congress, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is withdrawing several proposed changes to the Medicare drug program, but still charging ahead with others that could prove disruptive.

Nearly 950,000 Americans selected a health insurance plan through the state and federal exchanges in February. That brought the total to 4.2 million with one month left in the open enrollment period.

Privately run, long-term managed care programs aim to ease the burdens that come with treating Medicaid and dual-eligible beneficiaries in skilled nursing facilities.

Prescription records show that as use of opioids like OxyContin and Vicodin soared in the 2000s, so did the use of "benzos" such as Xanax, Klonopin, and Ativan, as opioid users discovered tranquilizers could enhance "the high."

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other population health initiatives cannot succeed without health information being able to flow between healthcare organizations and providers.

The National Committee for Quality Assurance, under increasing pressure to demonstrate the value of its recognition programs, previewed new patient-centered medical home standards intended to put more emphasis on team-based care, integrating behavioral health and sustaining practice transformation.

A Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposal would remove a number of prescription drug classes from Medicare Part D drug plans, while also limiting the number of plans insurers could offer to seniors.

Electronic health records are supposed to represent the next great leap in medicine - reducing medical errors and enhancing the physician's diagnostic powers.

he lower chamber is expected to vote on legislation that would permanently repeal Medicare's sustainable growth-rate formula for physician payment, which might also include a provision to either repeal or delay the ACA's individual insurance mandate as a way to pay for the SGR fix.

With just three weeks left to sign up under President Barack Obama's healthcare law, a major survey tracking the rollout finds that the uninsured rate keeps going down.

Just in case Congress doesn't pass President Barack Obama's fiscal 2015 budget plan, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services say they have other options for finding the money they need to implement the health care law.

Value-based insurance design (VBID) plans with certain features aside from solely lowering cost sharing can increase medication adherence, according to a study.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), in his first speech as the new chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, said it's important for Congress to pass legislation that would permanently repeal Medicare's contentious physician payment formula, but did not say how lawmakers intend to pay for it.

Open enrollment for the 2014 state and federal health insurance exchanges will end this month, but various findings contest their anticipated success.

President Barack Obama is proposing more than $400 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next decade in his fiscal 2015 budget, an almost identical amount to what he recommended last year. But those cuts are heavily weighted toward future years, with only $3.5 billion occurring in 2015.