Rating the quality of hospital care has become all the rage, despite the risk of consumers not really understanding what the ratings mean. Now www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov has detailed hospital rating information for comparison.

Medicare patients – many of whom have multiple chronic illnesses – face severe difficulty in receiving healthcare if Congress does not act to avert pending cuts to Medicare payments, according to first-hand reports from physicians who specialize in internal medicine released today by the 125,000-member American College of Physicians (ACP).

If the care received by vulnerable older people concurrently enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid was evaluated on a grading scale, it would squeak by with a barely passing mark, a new UCLA study has found.

Medicare recipients - particularly senior citizens - and their families are urged to be aware that some health insurance companies are employing aggressive marketing tactics to sell Medicare Advantage products which may mislead consumers. According to the Department's respected Seniors' Health Insurance Information Program (SHIIP), many Medicare beneficiaries are receiving bad financial advice leading them to make decisions which are not in their best interest.

A survey of Medicare patients who had major elective surgery found that although most participated in the decision regarding the hospital at which they would undergo their procedures, physicians served as the main decision-makers one-third of the time, according to an article in the March issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.