Health news round up

Shortage of lab workers could threaten health system

The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Landro reports that health experts are worried about a growing shortage of medical lab professionals. 

Landro writes:

“Like the growing shortages of primary-care doctors and nurses, the shrinking ranks of skilled lab workers pose a potential threat to the safety and quality of health care, medical experts warn. Hospitals say it currently can take as much as a year to fill some job openings.”

And the outlook is not good, she says:

“Lab-science-training programs are expensive to run, and while some new degree programs have been started, a third of the training programs at colleges around the country have closed down over the past decade. That bodes poorly for hospitals seeking to fill job openings. The federal government estimates that 138,000 new lab professionals will be needed by 2012 to replace technicians expected to retire, but only 50,000 will be trained by that time.”

To learn more:

• Read Landro’s article: Staff Shortages May Put Patients at Risk. (Subscription or fee may be required.)

Medicare funds dwindling

The Obama administration yesterday warned that the financial condition of Medicare and Social Security have deteriorated and both programs are projected to run out of funds sooner that previously predicted, the New York Times and other papers report.

In the New York Times, Robert Pear reports that because of falling tax revenues due to the recession

“. . .  the administration said, the Medicare fund that pays hospital bills for older Americans is expected to run out of money in 2017, two years sooner than projected last year. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than predicted, it said.”

The Administration is arguing that Medicare’s impending crisis demonstrates the need for a major reform of the U.S. health care system, writes Amy Goldstein in The Washington Post writes:

“Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sought to use the report to build momentum for health-care reform, reiterating the administration’s contention that the best way to strengthen Medicare’s finances is to, as she put it, ‘fix what’s broken in the rest of the health-care system.’”

In a related story in the New York Times, David Lionhardt writes that Congress is struggling to figure out how to pay for health care reform.

“Providing health insurance to the roughly 50 million people without it will cost something like $120 billion a year.President Obama has proposed $60 billion or so in new revenue for this purpose — a “down payment,” his advisers say. But Congress seems set to reject about half of the down payment (a plan to limit high-income families’ tax deductions for charitable giving and other such things). That makes for the $90 billion health care hole,” Lionhardt writes. “And no one is quite sure how to fill it.”

To learn more:

• Read Robert Pear’s article: Recession Drains Social Security and Medicare.
• Read Amy Goldstein’s article: Alarm Sounded on Social Security.
• Read David Lionhardt’s article: Health Care, a Lesson in Pain.

King County employees need to chip in to pay for healthcare, says Seattle Times

The Seattle Times editorial page endorses a proposal by Metropolitan King County Council Members Bob Ferguson and Dow Constantine to require County employees “earning more than the county mean income — about $60,000 — to pay a small part of monthly premiums:

“The county’s endless cycle of budget woes has several organic causes, and one is its deluxe health plan. Workers currently pay zero toward health-care premiums, an increasingly unheard of practice in both the public and private sectors,” the editors argue.

To learn more:

• Read King County health-care cuts: a dose of reality

Tags: Health Insurance, Health-care Reform, Healthcare Policy, Insurance, Lab Workers, Medical Laboratory Workers

Category: Health Insurance, Health-care Policy, Insurance, Lab Tests & Diagnostics