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What does AI mean for patients in bed and doctors at the bedside? Host Chip Kahn and guest Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, discuss whether AI will produce a different kind of doctor in the future — a “clinician curator rather than a clinician-diagnostician.” The answer could define the future of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship.
This issue brief provides an overview of the H-1B visa program, analyzes trends in H-1B visa approvals for the health care and social assistance industries using data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and discusses potential implications of recent policies impacting the H-1B program on the U.S. health care workforce.
This policy watch discusses the implications for the U.S. health care workforce of the recent DOS immigrant visa pause for individuals from 75 countries deemed more likely to be a public charge.
Medicare Advantage enrollees were in a plan that included just under half (48%) of all physicians available to traditional Medicare beneficiaries in their area in 2022, on average. The limitations of provider networks illustrate one of the key tradeoffs for beneficiaries in choosing Medicare Advantage for their coverage.
Each year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) updates Medicare payments for physician services and other Part B services through rulemaking. This issue brief answers key questions about how physicians are paid under the Medicare program, and reviews policy options under discussion for payment reform.
This brief examines the supply of OB-GYNs in the U.S. and the share of OB-GYNs participating in the provider networks of Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) offered in the individual market in the federal and state Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces in 2021.
This issue brief analyzes the role that immigrants play in the hospital workforce, overall and by occupation and state. Immigrants account for about one in six hospital workers, including among clinical and nonclinical workers.
Promoting price transparency in health care is a policy approach with bi-partisan support in Congress and the public at large. This analysis examines the vast troves of price transparency data that payers are required and finds unlikely prices, inconsistencies, and other oddities that pose major challenges for efforts to use it to promote competition and drive down prices.
This brief provides the most recent data on the extent to which non-pediatric physicians are opting out of Medicare, by specialty and by state.
In this column, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman explores the state of consumer protections in health care and explains why, even with consumer frustration clear, Congress is unlikely to pursue major new health insurance protections but there could be some modest steps.
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