TGIF

The House of Representatives joined the Senate in voting to repeal fundamental provisions of the Affordable Care Act, such as the individual and employer mandates and related taxes, on Wednesday and the President vetoed the bill today. The particulars may be found in the latest Week in Congress report. According to that report, the House will vote on overriding the veto on January 26. The vote again illustrates the importance of the Presidential election later this year.

Nextgov.com reports that

When a foreign power as early as 2013 first hacked the Office of Personnel Management and retrieved IT manuals for its network, swept up in the heist were the usernames and the last four digits of the Social Security numbers of certain system users. That detail was not disclosed to lawmakers until Thursday [at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing].  Federal officials had always maintained the attackers — who would go on to nab 21.5 million background check records last year — never obtained personally identifiable information during the first breach.  

That’s a bit of a stunner considering the number of Congressional hearing on the breach that were conducted last summer. More hearing details are available at the Committee’s website.  The Committee clearly is distraught.

HHS’s Office for Civil Rights issued a compendium of guidance on patient and health plan member access to their records held by health care providers and insurers.

Fierce Health Care offers health care system executives predictions for 2016 that are worth a glance. The executives should take a look at this Reuters report that hospital discharge instructions are too complicated for most patients to understand.

Patient reading level didn’t appear to influence the odds of returning to the hospital within a month of discharge or the likelihood that they would call the hospital with questions, the study found. But often, when these things happened, the patient had a reading level too low to understand the discharge notes.

Back to the drawing board on that one.

Have a good weekend and go Washington Redskins.