In what could be the first step toward breaking a pattern of annual short-term fixes to the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula that governs Medicare payments, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) today voted to approve a proposal to repeal it.

Consumers’ confidence in their ability to access and pay for health care services rose slightly last month, but concerns remain, according to the Thomson Reuters Consumer Healthcare Sentiment Index.

Unnecessary tests and treatments cost the U.S. health care system $6.7 billion in 2009, but expenditures for unnecessary imaging dwarfed those for other procedures, according to a research letter published in the October 1 edition of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Cindy Moran, a former Republican Senate staffer who now lobbies for the American College of Radiology (ACR), doesn't mince words when it comes to the prospect of the Congressional supercommittee recommending using health care cuts to reduce the nation's budget deficit by at least $1.2 trillion in the next 10 years.

San Francisco outpatient diagnostic imaging provider Fusion Diagnostic Group LLC has been purchased by the California Pacific Medical Center, part of the not-for-profit Northern California healthcare network Sutter Health.

Rising health care costs and health care reform—particularly the creation of health insurance exchanges (HIEs)--may actually benefit, rather than hurt, 10 health care sub-segments.

Twenty medical specialty groups today urged the Congressional Supercommittee to scrap the controversial Medicare payment advisory panel (IPAB) established under health care reform law.

Lawyers for California and the federal government today urged the U.S. Supreme Court not to allow patients and doctors to initiating lawsuits over cuts to Medicaid payments.