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What's the Healthcare.gov goal? 80 percent enrollment success rate

Obama administration officials are quietly hoping 80 percent of users will be able to enroll in health insurance plans on the federal health law's healthcare.gov website once it is fixed, The Washington Post reports. In the meantime, other website snags come to light -- a lack of Spanish-language materials and early alarm at some problems at rolling out the site.

19 Nov 2013

White House struggles to save health law

The Associated Press reports the president needs breakthroughs on three fronts: the cancellations and technology messes and the crisis in confidence among his own supporters. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports the White House is probing how the rollout flopped despite what they had believed was sufficient planning.

19 Nov 2013

Viewpoints: Obamacare has resisted death throes before; website success stories from 3 governors; health law taking a toll on choice of doctors in Medicare Advantage

The first time Obamacare seemed finished, doomed, doornail-dead, the voters of Massachusetts played the would-be executioner. In January 2010, they sent a pickup-driving Republican to the Senate to fill Ted Kennedy's seat, apparently depriving the health care bill of its crucial 60th vote and sending Democrats scrambling for a Plan B. ... the deeper force at work, the reason that these near-death experiences keep happening, isn't a website or a broken presidential promise. It's a problem inherent to contemporary liberalism, which is that liberals' proudest achievement, the modern welfare state, tends to resist, corrupt and baffle their efforts at comprehensive reform (Ross Douthat, 11/16).

19 Nov 2013

Vismodegib drug does not offer added benefits for patients with BCC

The drug vismodegib (trade name: Erivedge) is approved for the treatment of patients with two forms of basal cell carcinoma: symptomatic metastatic BCC and locally advanced BCC inappropriate for surgery or radiotherapy.

19 Nov 2013

First Edition: November 18, 2013

Today's headlines include reports about the political implications of the healthcare.gov difficulties as well continued coverage of reaction to President Barack Obama's policy cancellation fix.

18 Nov 2013

Medical image exchange: an interview with Willie Tillery, CEO of Accelarad

Accelarad’s team first recognized the need for the virtualization of radiology more than 10 years ago. Over the past six years, the industry has readily adopted cloud-based medical image exchanges, as evidenced by the thousands of physicians who share nearly half a billion images via Accelarad each year.

18 Nov 2013

Researchers develop more accurate way to calculate "bad" cholesterol

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a more accurate way to calculate low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, the so-called "bad" form of blood fat that can lead to hardening of the arteries and increase the risk of heart attack and stroke.

18 Nov 2013

Health insurers leery about 'fix' to Obamacare woes

Top insurance industry executives met with the president on Friday and two spoke this morning, saying the rules change could create "problems."

18 Nov 2013

Medicaid enrollment progresses under health overhaul

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants to delay his plan to move more than 70,000 people off Medicaid because the health law online marketplaces are not working well enough yet.

16 Nov 2013

Consumers beware: Cheaper insurance policies mean higher deductibles

Bloomberg News reports that consumers buying cheap insurance in the new health insurance marketplaces may face sticker shock if they get sick next year because of deductibles that can top $6,000 a person.

16 Nov 2013

Health law fumbles threaten Obama's agenda

Media analyses argue the health law's rollout problems are endangering the rest of President Barack Obama's second-term agenda as his credibility and job approval ratings suffer. Others see his blunt admission of blame as an effort to improve his public standing and counter a revolt within his own party.

16 Nov 2013

California shuts down 10 sites imitating state insurance marketplace

The California attorney general said her office shuttered 10 websites that had mimicked the state's official health insurance exchange "in order to lure consumers away from plans that provide the benefits of the Affordable Care Act."

16 Nov 2013

First Edition: November 15, 2013

Today's headlines include range of stories examining the policy, marketplace and political dynamics in play as a result of President Barack Obama's move to stop the cancellation of insurance plans.

15 Nov 2013

Viewpoints: Despite website woes, administration should be given more time; health law credibility 'going up in smoke'

The enrollment numbers are in, and as expected, they are well short of projections. Around 106,000 enrolled in new plans during October - with approximately 27,000 coming from states where the federal government is running the exchange (with its extensive problems), and another 79,000 coming through the state exchanges. Republicans are gleefully pointing to the numbers as proof Obamacare needs to be scrapped entirely. That confirms two things we've long known to be true: the website is a disaster, and short term enrollment figures are a serious political problem for the White House and Democrats (Greg Sargent, 11/13).

15 Nov 2013

Why California could delay Anthem's cancellations; young people's coverage costs

NPR examines an administration claim that half of young people can get coverage for $50 per month or less, while California Healthline explores the reasons the state insurance commissioner was able to delay Anthem's cancellations.

15 Nov 2013

HHS health insurance enrollment figures far below targets

Only about a fourth of the enrollees signed up through the federal health exchange. The low initial sign up could set up a steep challenge for the health law.

15 Nov 2013

Congressional Democrats fuming at White House handling of health law

An increasing number of these lawmakers say they favor a legislative plan offered by Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana to allow people whose insurance has been canceled because of the law to keep it.

15 Nov 2013

What the health law's future holds: Fixing the website and everything after

News outlets report on the various ways the website issues and sign-up woes could be addressed, as well as what a variety of experts say about the global outlook for the health law.

15 Nov 2013

House oversight panel grills administration tech officials on website woes

The White House's chief technology officer, Todd Park, told the committee that teams are working aggressively to get the website functioning "for the vast majority" of consumers by the administration's Nov. 30 deadline. Meanwhile, a second panel heard testimony about website and security concerns.

15 Nov 2013

Obama faces trust issues as a result of health law woes

President Barack Obama -- and Democrats, by proxy -- face big political problems as a result of the botched rollout of the insurance website and the debunking of his pledge that Americans could keep their health plans if they liked them. Recent polls have Democrats and Republicans neck-and-neck in midterm election polls, and Fox News reports that half of voters think the president "knowingly lied" about the health law.

15 Nov 2013