05/16/2012 by David Lazarus
Most bills from L.A. County healthcare providers are short on details, but patients deserve a full accounting of what treatment was provided and at what price.
It’s tough enough to be without health insurance. But do healthcare providers have to make it even worse by treating you like a moron?
05/15/2012 by Darla Bowsher
Healthy “brain foods” don’t have to cost you any more than you already spend at the grocery store – and they may save you money later by protecting your health.
It’ll take more than an apple a day to keep the doctor away, but your diet can help keep disease at bay. It seems like almost every month a new scientific study shows the health benefits of certain foods.
03/20/2012 by Laura Johannes
Chocoholics are rejoicing amid a proliferation of new scientific evidence showing cocoa may be good for the heart. But most chocolate is packed with calories and unhealthy sugar. A wave of new products with high levels of pure cocoa is being marketed as a way to enjoy chocolate’s benefits without empty calories.
The cocoa bean, actually a seed, grows in pods on trees. It contains compounds called flavanols, which have been shown to lower blood pressure, improve blood flow and reduce overall risk of heart disease. Three scientific analyses published in the past six months pooled results of smaller studies to conclude that cocoa is good for the heart. Scientists believe flavanols work, at least in part, by stimulating production of nitric oxide, which relaxes vessels and improves blood flow.
03/12/2012 by Andrea Petersen
While massage may have developed a reputation as a decadent treat for people who love pampering, new studies are showing it has a wide variety of tangible health benefits.
Research over the past couple of years has found that massage therapy boosts immune function in women with breast cancer, improves symptoms in children with asthma, and increases grip strength in patients with carpal tunnel syndrome. Giving massages to the littlest patients, premature babies, helped in the crucial task of gaining weight.
The benefits go beyond feelings of relaxation and wellness that people may recognize after a massage. The American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society now include massage as one of their recommendations for treating low back pain, according to guidelines published in 2007.
03/12/2012 by James R. Hagerty
Some people pursue celebrity. Others stumble into it as they are rushing off to bridge club.
My 85-year-old mom, Marilyn Hagerty, a newspaper columnist, is in the latter category. When she wrote a review of the new Olive Garden restaurant in Grand Forks, N.D., last week, she wasn’t expecting anyone other than her thousands of loyal readers in North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota to take note. She didn’t worry about how her story would play on Gawker, partly because she had never heard of Gawker.
03/12/2012 by Lynn Hicks
Did you see 27-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe Ben Milne, who created two successful companies in his 20s, including the mobile payment darling Dwolla? Or Ben Silbermann, who 10 years after graduating from Des Moines’ Roosevelt High School helped launch Pinterest, one of the fastest-growing websites ever?
But if you look beyond those headline-grabbing names, you’re more likely to find a baby boomer launching a new business.
02/08/2012 by Amanda Buchanan
High hospital costs seem to be a fact of life that most Americans have reluctantly come to accept. What most people don’t realize, however, is that not all of those charges are legit — and in fact, many medical bills contain fraudulent charges.
In 2010 alone, Medicare and Medicaid paid an estimated $70 billion in improper hospital payments, according to a 2011 Government Accountability Office study. But it’s not just nameless, faceless bureaucratic entities getting hit up for costs they shouldn’t have to pay.
02/06/2012 by Peter Waldman
Aetna Inc. is suing seven California surgery centers for a billing system that it claims “recklessly subverts” health care delivery with charges of as much as $66,100 for a bunion repair.
The lawsuit seeks to stop the centers from waiving the co- insurance payments people are supposed to be charged when they use doctors or facilities that don’t have contracts with their insurers. By not requiring such payments for so-called out-of- network care, the centers illegally lured patients, and then billed Aetna up to 2,500 percent more than what the company pays its contracted providers for procedures, according to the suit.
01/15/2012 by Kerry Wills and Tracy Connor
The hospital cured his pneumonia, but the bill — for an eye-popping $44 million — made him sick.
Unemployed doorman Alexis Rodriguez couldn’t believe his eyes when he opened an envelope from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital last week and saw what he appeared to owe.
“I almost had an asthma attack,” said Rodriguez, 28, just one of several hundred patients to receive absurdly inflated bills because of a “system error.”
01/03/2012 by Gary W. Small, M.D.
My wife’s 103-year-old grandmother lived in a third floor walk-up apartment in New York City. Every day she walked up and down those stairs several times to go shopping, to the post office, the dry cleaner’s and do other little errands. At 103, she was as sharp as a tack. She never forgot a birthday, an anniversary or a single holiday. And God forbid you forgot to send her a card or call her on her birthday — you’d hear about it for ages. The exercise she got on those stairs and errands may not only have protected her heart so she could live past 100, it may also have protected her brain.
