First Edition: May 11, 2010

May 11 2010

Today's coverage includes more details regarding how the new health law moves forward with efforts to provide health insurance coverage to young adults.

Health On The Hill: Health Insurance Coverage For Young Adults Moves Forward Kaiser Health News staff writer Mary Agnes Carey talks with the Kaiser Family Foundation's Jackie Judd about newly released proposed regulation "to implement a provision in the health care law that would allow adult children to stay on their parents' health insurance policy until age 26" (Kaiser Health News).

Rules Let Youths Stay On Parents' Insurance The White House issued rules on Monday allowing young adults to remain covered by their parents' health insurance policies up to age 26 (The New York Times).

New Coverage For Young Adults Will Raise Premiums Letting young adults stay on their parents' health insurance until they turn 26 will nudge premiums nearly 1 percent higher for employer plans, the government said in an estimate released Monday (The Associated Press).

Health Law Limits Premiums For Young Adults Insurers and employers will not be able to charge higher rates for young adults who stay on their parents' insurance plans than they charge for younger children, according to federal rules released Monday (The Wall Street Journal).

Some Families Face Higher Health Premiums To Insure Adult Children Some families could pay a price if they seize the chance offered by the new health-care law to keep children up to age 26 on their insurance policies, regulations drafted by the Obama administration show (The Washington Post).

HHS Touts Health Care 'Progress' The Obama administration told Congressional leaders on Monday that it has made "significant progress" implementing the health care overhaul, including a load of consumer friendly provisions that could ease negative perceptions of the plan among a skeptical public (Politico).

Is Transparency A Price Of Reform? Some House Democrats are not content with the transparency requirements in the health care overhaul and say they're committed to trying to force hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and other industries to reveal their price tags (Politico).

Florida Suit Poses A Challenge To Health Care Law As they constructed the requirement that Americans have health insurance, Democrats in Congress took pains to make their bill as constitutionally impregnable as possible (The New York Times).

New Spending For A Wider Range Of Sex Education In a sharp departure from the abstinence-only message of the Bush years, the new health law pours hundreds of millions of dollars into sex education programs that aim to provide teenagers with comprehensive information about protecting themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (The New York Times).

New Health-Care Law Raises Concerns About Respecting Providers' Consciences Deep within the massive health-care overhaul legislation, a few little-noticed provisions have quietly reignited one of the bitterest debates in medicine: how to balance the right of doctors, nurses and other workers to refuse to provide services on moral or religious grounds with the right of patients to get care (The Washington Post).

War Of Words Heats Up Between Obama, WellPoint The war of words between the Obama administration and WellPoint Inc. escalated over the weekend, as WellPoint's chief executive rebuked the president for what she said was false information he gave the public about the insurer's coverage of breast-cancer patients (The Wall Street Journal).

City Hospitals' Budget To Cut 500 More Jobs New York City's Health & Hospitals Corp., the nation's largest public hospital system, plans to stanch a $1.2 billion budget gap in the next year's budget by laying off about 500 workers and ending contracts with "a significant number" of physicians, its president said (The Wall Street Journal).

The Changing Veteran Poses Challenges For The VA Veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars face different problems from other vets. They're younger, more of them are female and nearly half of them come home with a mental disorder, such as PTSD. So the Veterans Affairs Department is attempting to evolve to serve their needs — but Secretary Eric Shinseki has a huge to-do list (NPR).

Quality, Economy, Transparency: A New Health Care Code In 2003, most Wisconsin hospitals voluntarily began telling the public and their competitors the cost and the quality of the care delivered in their facilities. If you wanted to know how much treating a case of pneumonia or a heart attack cost at the local hospital and how well the hospital performed on a checklist of best practices for delivering that care, you could look it up on an easy-to-navigate website published by the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (The Fiscal Times).