Tara Bannow

3 weeks ago | statnews.com | Tara Bannow

UnitedHealth Group’s new CEO told investors that the company is reevaluating how it tallies Medicare Advantage patients’ diagnoses for reimbursement purposes, an issue currently under investigation by the Justice Department. Stephen Hemsley’s remarks during the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Monday signal a noteworthy shift: UnitedHealth is now publicly acknowledging potential issues with how it assesses the health of its Medicare Advantage members.

3 weeks ago | statnews.com | Tara Bannow

The relentless drumbeat of cuts to U.S. government research and disease prevention have devastated tens of thousands of affected workers and academics. To hear them tell it, today’s children and grandchildren will live shorter lives and the brightest scientists will flee the country. There’s one man at the center of it all and, chances are, you haven’t even heard of him.

3 weeks ago | shorturl.at | Tara Bannow

The relentless drumbeat of cuts to U.S. government research and disease prevention have devastated tens of thousands of affected workers and academics. To hear them tell it, today’s children and grandchildren will live shorter lives and the brightest scientists will flee the country. There’s one man at the center of it all and, chances are, you haven’t even heard of him.

1 month ago | statnews.com | Tara Bannow

SAN FRANCISCO — Lurking beneath the shiny promise of artificial intelligence in health care is a host of potential liability issues. Chief among them: a lack of consent from patients, whether any doctor checks the machine’s work, and, if they do, whether that even helps. A panel of legal and medical experts at STAT’s Breakthrough Summit West explained the myriad legal questions hanging over the adoption of AI in health care.

1 month ago | statnews.com | Tara Bannow |Bob Herman

House Republicans plan to slash $715 billion from state Medicaid programs over the next decade, but their proposal spares special Medicaid payments hospitals increasingly use to pad their bottom lines. Hospitals and state governments have devised complicated, murky funding mechanisms in Medicaid under the guise of keeping hospitals whole. In most cases, they end up directing extra cash to those providers with little federal oversight.