Carol Gentry

A national movement to find the uninsured and get them plugged into benefits under the Affordable Care Act kicked off Tuesday night at a house party  in Tampa.

The Harbour Island get-together, which attracted about 30 volunteers, was the first official event in the nation for Get Covered, America, organizers said. Other Get Covered events are scheduled for Wednesday in Phoenix, Ariz.,  and Austin, Texas. The official launch of the enrollment effort is Saturday.

Florida has ended its three-year investigation of "Lifestyle Lifts" with a settlement that could bring refunds to a few and an agreement by the company to cover the state's costs.

(UPDATED) In a long-awaited move, federal health officials on Friday granted Florida's request to expand its five-county pilot Medicaid managed-care project statewide.  Mindful of how some Florida Medicaid HMOs have behaved in the past, the deal includes what an independent analyst called "unprecedented consumer protections."

Earlier this year, both Govs. Jan Brewer of Arizona and Rick Scott of Florida surprised political pundits by coming out in support of Medicaid expansion. Both Republican governors had been fierce critics of the Affordable Care Act, but they said they favored the expansion because it would hurt the people of their state to turn down federal funds.

But the outcomes were quite different. Brewer muscled it through the Arizona Legislature, winning victory on Thursday after months of uncertainty and bare-knuckle politics. 

On June 22, consumer-health groups across the nation will launch what they hope will be a massive education and enrollment campaign to find uninsured people and get them ready to sign up for health coverage.

A Tampa Bay anesthesiologist convicted of possessing child pornography,  Dr. James D. Murphy Jr., escaped a jail sentence. He hoped to keep his medical license and eventually return to practice.

Department of Health prosecutors were willing. But the Board of Medicine was most emphatically not.

On Friday, when Murphy’s case came before the board at its meeting in Tampa, members said there is no way they would let him return to practice.

The 2013 Legislature could have fixed a tiny gap in Florida law that blocks health officials from regulating hundreds of out-of-state compounding pharmacies that ship high-risk drugs into this state.

Microbial contamination has been verified in two batches of drugs from a Tennessee compounding pharmacy that were shipped into Florida and other states, federal health officials say.

The Food and Drug Administration reported Thursday that vials of injectable steroids from separate batches contained both bacterial and fungal contaminants. The drugs were a type of steroids, prepared for injections, and were subject to contamination because they were free of preservatives.

Last month, state lawmakers ended their 2013 session without taking action on Medicaid expansion, leaving $51 billion dollars in federal funds on the table. That inaction could cost both taxpayers and employers a bundle, as a new report shows.

Three House Republican leaders who blocked the expansion of health coverage to more than 1 million low-income Floridians last month will soon get a greeting card in the mail.

A Tennessee compounding pharmacy accused of shipping steroids into Florida that caused 13 patients to suffer injection-site infections has agreed not to send any more high-risk products into the state.

Ten Florida health insurers have filed documents indicating they want to compete for shoppers on the Affordable Care Act marketplace when it opens Oct. 1, state records indicate.  However, it is not clear whether all of them will follow through or receive federal approval.

The list has not been released by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) nor the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Primary-care physicians who treat Florida Medicaid patients are eligible for a big, fat retroactive bonus thanks to the Affordable Care Act -- as long as they file for it by Friday, May 31.

The amount of money at stake is considerable, particularly in Florida, as Health News Florida reported in December. The ACA raises the pay rate for Medicaid to the level of Medicare for two years, as a way to get more doctors interested in participating.

Thirteen Florida patients have developed skin infections after receiving steroid injections shipped into the state from a compounding pharmacy in Tennessee, Florida health officials reported Wednesday.

Florida authorities are tracing the steroids that were shipped into the state from a Tennessee-based compounding pharmacy thought to be responsible for seven infections. The pharmacy had been in trouble before, but Florida and a dozen other states were still allowing it to ship in high-risk drugs.

Florida is one of 13 states that received drugs from a compounding pharmacy linked to a new outbreak of illness, health officials said late Friday afternoon.  At least three facilities in Florida -- two in Melbourne and one in Chipley -- received the suspect drugs, Florida Department of Health said Friday evening.

The steroids in question are the same type that caused an outbreak last year that hurt 720 people and killed 48 -- including five in this state.

At 7 a.m. on a Monday morning, poor people who don’t qualify for government health programs such as Medicaid are lined up outside a health department building on a busy street in St. Petersburg. 

Some lean against the wall; others sit on the ground, too sick to stand. 

At 7:30, the doors will open and those who are waiting will rush – or limp – inside to take a number. Lucky ones will get to see a doctor. First-come, first-served.

Thirty-seven percent of Florida hospitals have received an “A” grade from the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit organization that grades participating hospitals on their efforts to prevent medical errors, putting the Sunshine State in 10th place.

Even though Florida officials tried to block the implementation of the Affordable Care Act at every turn over the past three years, the state will gain millions in grants and hundreds of new jobs this year from its implementation.

Four dozen community health centers in Florida are eligible to share $8 million in federal grants to become enrollment centers for uninsured people who need to sign up for subsidized insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration announced Thursday.

The Florida Legislature ended its 2013 session without making a move on expanding health care in the state. But that doesn't mean there won't be health insurance changes in Florida. Carol Gentry of Health News Florida talked with WUSF's Craig Kopp about what happens now. 

It isn't exactly news that hospital bills bear no relation to what products and services actually cost, or the amount that is paid. 

What IS new is the pressure on the  hospital industry to defend its pricing system. On Wednesday, the Obama administration released data showing how much each hospital charges for various types of treatment and contrasts that with how much Medicare actually pays for it.

In an article published late last month, Health News Florida noted a warning from a tax expert who said Florida employers would pay a high price if the Florida Legislature failed to adopt Medicaid expansion.

Now the legislative session is over, without action on the expansion. Come Jan. 1, if nothing happens meanwhile to intervene, the state's businesses will find out whether Jackson Hewitt's Brian Haile was right.

When science bumps up against politics, it can get bruised, even distorted beyond recognition.

Dr. Richard Roetzheim, a family medicine professor at University of South Florida, says that is happening to him. He says his studies are being used in misleading ways by conservative opponents of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

They cite his studies as evidence that Medicaid's quality of care is poor. Some go so far as to say that Medicaid is worse than no coverage at all.

Fast-growing Health Management Associates has received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Naples-based hospital company told  investors on Thursday.

HMA was already under investigation by the Justice Department, a probe announced last summer that allegedly involved emergency room admissions. Now the SEC wants information on the chain's accounting practices. The agency asked for documents related to Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance, the company said in a news release.

It appears increasingly likely that the legislative session will end on Friday without agreement to accept more than $50 billion in federal funds to cover an estimated 1.1 million uninsured Floridians.

If Florida doesn't take the money, many of the poorest adults in the state -- those who have incomes under $12,000 a year -- won't be offered coverage on Jan. 1, when the expansion of health coverage under the Affordable Care Act goes into effect.

Democrats are so angry over House Republicans' refusal to accept federal funds to expand health coverage that they deliberately caused action on the floor to grind to a halt. The deliberate slowdown, which started  Tuesday afternoon, continued Wednesday, threatening to reduce the number of bills that will get a vote before Friday's end of the legislative session.

All the players in a long-running drama over drug-dispensing in workers’ compensation agreed to a compromise that will cap the amount doctors can charge for the drugs themselves, but doubles the amount they get paid for giving patients the drug.  

By a 71 to 45 vote, the Florida House of Representatives on Friday passed its own health plan, which relies on state money and bypasses more than $50 billion in federal funds. The vote, as expected, fell almost entirely along party lines.

Democrats all voted against the plan, according to the House web site. All except two Republicans -- Mike Fasano of New Port Richey and John Tobia of Melbourne Beach -- voted for it.

Florida businesses have more at stake in the Legislature’s decision on Medicaid expansion than they might realize, tax-policy experts say.  

Florida’s larger employers could face tax penalties of $146 million to $219 million a year if the state says no to federal funds and fails to cover low-income uninsured people via Medicaid, as called for in the Affordable Care Act, says tax-policy expert Brian Haile of Jackson Hewitt Tax Service.