Jordan Rau

Hospitals lately have been getting better at ensuring their patients don't relapse shortly after they walk out the door. Nonetheless, Medicare this week began docking a record number of hospitals for having too many readmissions.

Over the next year, 2,610 hospitals will lose some of their payments for each Medicare ...

Starting this fall, 25 percent of all U.S. hospitals — those with the worst records for infections and injuries — will lose 1 percent of every Medicare payment for a year.

Medical overtreatment is the inverse of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: While waste is easy to define in principle, it can be hard to know it when you see it.

A treatment that is appropriate for one patient can also be unnecessary or even counterproductive for ...

Three out of four physicians believe that fellow doctors prescribe an unnecessary test or procedure at least once a week, a survey released Thursday finds.

The most frequent reasons that physicians order extraneous — and costly --medical care are fears of being sued, impulses to be extra careful and desires ...

Everyone is on a voyage of self-discovery in Ida — the two central characters certainly, but also Poland-born, Britain-based director Pawel Pawlikowski, making his first film in the homeland he left at 14.

The austerely luminous black-and-white drama is set in 1962, an era the director can't remember all that ...

Physicians and health data specialists caution that the information can be easily misconstrued. Some cancer doctors receive payments that cover the cost of expensive drugs for patients.

People in much of Minnesota, northwestern Pennsylvania and Tucson, Ariz., are getting the best bargains from the health care law's new insurance marketplaces. Their premiums run half as much as those in the country's most expensive markets.

The 10 regions with the lowest premiums in the nation also include Salt ...

If you are buying health coverage in the Colorado ski resort towns, the Connecticut suburbs of New York City or a bunch of otherwise low-cost rural regions of Georgia, Mississippi and Nevada, you have the misfortune of living in the most expensive insurance marketplaces under the new health law.

The ...

Around a million people get hip or knee replacements a year, and those operations cost Medicare and private insurers a lot of money. For the first time, the federal government is evaluating how good a job individual hospitals are doing.

Medicare has identified 95 hospitals where elderly patients were more ...

As Congress mulls changing America's border and naturalization rules, a study finds that immigrant workers are helping buttress Medicare's finances.

Immigrants contribute tens of billions of dollars a year more than immigrant retirees use in medical services.

"Immigrants, particularly noncitizens, heavily subsidize Medicare," the researchers wrote in the ...

The idea that uneven Medicare health care spending around the country is caused by wasteful practices and overtreatment — a concept that has influenced portions of the federal health law — took another hit in a study published Tuesday.

The analysis concludes that differing levels of health of people ...

Doctors and hospital administrators in parts of the country that are heavy Medicare spenders can relax their grips on their prescription pads and billing computers.

An influential panel on Friday panned the idea raised in Congress to pay them less for Medicare services if their regions are heavy users of ...

Medicare is withholding 1 percent of its regular hospital payments to fund bonuses for hospitals that score well on quality tests. Separately, Medicare will penalize hospitals that have higher than expected readmission rates.

Patients in those places gave some of the lowest evaluations of their hospital stays, Medicare data show. The surveys asked patients how well their doctors and nurses communicated, wh...