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For all the current focus on Obamacare lurching into its infancy, 50-year-old Medicare is also undergoing profound and disruptive change as Congress struggles with soaring medical bills and a growing senior population.

Insurance shoppers often can't choose plans that their doctors take part in or include doctors near them. And doctors may not be able to confirm they're in a plan when patients ask them.

A government subsidy, little known outside health policy circles but critical to the hospitals' survival, is being sharply reduced under the new health law.

Whereas population health focuses on the outcomes within a specific group, personalized medicine seeks to customize care delivery at the individual level. A recent discussion between Dr Eric Topol, director, Scripps Translational Science Institute, and Dr Farzad Mostashari, former director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, highlighted the diverging opinions of where future healthcare models need to go.

The agency tasked with implementing the president's healthcare law said Thursday it had uncovered new stresses further downstream in the system that revealed the need for a fresh look at the back-end capacity needs of the online healthcare portal.

The Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee jointly released their draft legislation to reform physician payment under Medicare on October 30.

Bowing to intense criticism, President Barack Obama apologized to Americans who are losing health insurance plans he repeatedly said they could keep and pledged to find fixes that might allow people to keep their coverage.

Tony Trenkle, the laconic federal official who was both the CMS' point man on the $16.6 billion electronic health-record incentive payment program and its technology leader during the launch of the troubled HealthCare.gov, will be stepping down as the agency's chief information officer and its director of information services to work in the private sector.

Some of the most significant changes in healthcare reform are being led by oncologists, especially as innovation and team-based collaboration are increasingly becoming the standard in cancer care delivery.

Healthcare reform, an aging population and a physician shortage are factors forcing hospital executives to rethink staffing, both inside and outside hospital walls, according to a panel discussion Tuesday during the U.S. News & World Report's Hospital of Tomorrow conference.

Oncologists are at the forefront of payment and delivery reforms sweeping medicine today, a former head of Medicare said.

U.S. health insurer Humana Inc on Wednesday said it expected earnings to decline next year because of spending on the new health exchanges and on the Medicaid program for the poor.

Among state experiments in Medicaid policy, Colorado's accountable care collaborative program is showing early successes in coordinating care and curtailing overutilization - and its analytics platform is supporting a good deal of the collaboration, despite a number of hurdles.

Take a mental snapshot of the U.S. health care system as it is today, because in 10 years, you might not recognize it. And if something isn't done now to boost the number of doctors in the U.S., you may not like it, either.

As the U.S. News & World Report Hospital of Tomorrow conference continues this week in Washington, DC, one message is clear: the future of healthcare will not look anything like it does today.

Ohio is planning to implement a public- and private-sector partnership to cut healthcare costs in the Medicaid program and the private insurance market. The state aims to have 90 percent of its population covered by insurance emphasizing value over volume within five years.

Much of the shortage of primary care physicians expected over the next decade could be eliminated if the nation increases use of new models of medical care that expand the role of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The American Journal of Managed Care is attending this week's U.S. News & World Report Hospital of Tomorrow conference in Washington, D.C. The groundbreaking 3-day event features top hospital executives and healthcare visionaries as they address the critical challenges facing health systems, discuss how leading hospitals are creating solutions, and examine the pioneering best practices that are emerging in response.

Millions of people could qualify for federal subsidies that will pay the entire monthly cost of some health care plans being offered in the online marketplaces set up under President Obama's health care law, a surprising figure that has not garnered much attention, in part because the zero-premium plans come with serious trade-offs.

A recent analysis shows that people are electing to enroll in Medicaid instead of buying private health insurance on the 15 state-based health insurance exchanges. It's projected that if this trend continues, there will not be enough healthy young people buying health insurance to make the system work.

The challenges in reforming healthcare seemingly continue to increase.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has asked the manufacturer of the leukemia chemotherapy drug Iclusig (ponatinib) to suspend marketing and sales of Iclusig because of the risk of life-threatening blood clots and severe narrowing of blood vessels.

The future of healthcare will likely rely on the advances that technology can provide.

One month into open enrollment on the health insurance exchanges, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized for what she described as a "miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans" on the federal online marketplace known as HealthCare.gov.

Matching labor supply with service demand is a challenge for many US industries, but perhaps no industry faces greater workforce pressures than healthcare.

After focusing for weeks on the technical failures of President Obama's health insurance website, Republicans on Tuesday broadened their criticism of the health care law, pointing to Americans whose health plans have been terminated because they do not meet the law's new coverage requirements.

Consumers who buy a health insurance policy good for only 364 days might save hundreds of dollars in premiums, but they could also find themselves without important benefits and charged a penalty for not having insurance next year.

Making health data more transparent could give momentum to an effort aiming to make hospital operations more cost-effective and driven toward improving health outcomes.

There has been a lot of press lately about care coordination, and how it will play a significant role in improving patient outcomes. But despite all of this positive coverage, inter-organizational care coordination is far from becoming a reality.

Under PPACA, in every interaction between patients, doctors, insurers, manufacturers and researchers, the incentive to control costs and provide better service is replaced with the decree to do so.