When a health insurer refuses to pay for your treatment, you may have the right to have the denial reviewed — and potentially overturned — by an independent provider. Here are six steps experts suggest to help you through the external appeal process.
Claim denial rates from health insurers have been declining (maybe) - Kevin Drum
I'll have our last ACS chart later, but in the meantime I happened to run across some actual data about health insurer claim denial rates, the topic du jour since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in broad daylight, allegedly in part because of his company's astronomical denial rate. These figures come from ACA transparency data and is limited…
Trump-appointed judges refuse to block Trump blacklisting of Anthropic AI tech
Appeals court denies Anthropic's emergency motion for a stay.
PTAB Affirms §101 Rejection of Human Milk Product Claims
Patent Trial and Appeal Board Doubles Down on Natural Products Doctrine in Human Milk Case
Can Consumers Make Affordable Care Affordable? The Value of Choice Architecture
Tens of millions of people are currently choosing health coverage on a state or federal health insurance exchange as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We examine how well people make these choices, how well they think they do, and what can be done to improve these choices. We conducted 6 experiments asking people to choose the most cost-effective policy using websites modeled on current exchanges. Our results suggest there is significant room for improvement. Without interventions, respondents perform at near chance levels and show a significant bias, overweighting out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles. Financial incentives do not improve performance, and decision-makers do not realize that they are performing poorly. However, performance can be improved quite markedly by providing calculation aids, and by choosing a “smart” default. Implementing these psychologically based principles could save purchasers of policies and taxpayers approximately 10 billion dollars every year.
PTAB Reverses § 101 Rejection of Receptor-Derived Peptide Claims
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) Reverses 35 U.S.C. § 101 Subject Matter Eligibility Rejection of Receptor-Derived Peptide Claims
NY Times cited 29 times to justify decision limiting trans healthcare
Meanwhile, other mainstream media newsrooms treated the U.S. v. Skrmetti case as an opportunity to center coverage around the expected result.
Estimating Causal Effects of Treatments in Randomized and Nonrandomized Studies
Presents a discussion of matching, randomization, random sampling, and other methods of controlling extraneous variation. The objective was to specify the benefits of randomization in estimating causal effects of treatments. It is concluded that randomization should be employed whenever possible but that the use of carefully controlled nonrandomized data to estimate causal effects is a reasonable and necessary procedure in many cases.
The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year*
Abstract In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid. This lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of low-income adults using a randomized controlled design. In the year after random assignment, the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected. We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group.
The Medium is the Message: How Non-Clinical Information Shapes Clinical Decisions in LLMs | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
There has been a growing interest in the HCI community to study Health, with particular focus in understanding healthcare practices and designing technologies to support and to enhance these practices. A majority of current health studies in HCI have ...
Your doctor’s AI notetaker may be making things up, Ontario audit finds
Made-up therapy referrals, incorrect prescriptions among the common mistakes.
PTAB Reverses §101 Rejection of Cannabis Composition Claims
Patent Trial and Appeal Board Finds That Cannabis Delivery System Is Not a Natural Product
Pro Se Plaintiff Caught Hiding Prompt Injections In Court Filings; Responds By Hiding More
There have now been dozens of stories of bad lawyers using AI results in filings, most of which show up in the form of fake case citations. That’s old hat at this point. But how about prompt …
Randomized Controlled Trials without Data Retention
Amidst rising appreciation for privacy and data usage rights, researchers have increasingly acknowledged the principle of data minimization, which holds that the accessibility, collection, and retention of subjects' data should be kept to the bare amount needed to answer focused research questions. Applying this principle to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), this paper presents algorithms for making accurate inferences from RCTs under stringent data retention and anonymization policies. In particular, we show how to use recursive algorithms to construct running estimates of treatment effects in RCTs, which allow individualized records to be deleted or anonymized shortly after collection. Devoting special attention to non-i.i.d. data, we further show how to draw robust inferences from RCTs by combining recursive algorithms with bootstrap and federated strategies.
Watch These Judges Rip Into Lawyers For Citing Cases That Don't Exist
“It's striking, concerning, disappointing, and saddening to think that members of the bar would forward cases to a court that don't exist, and to think that the lawyers on the other side of that didn’t read it for whatever reason, didn’t check it.”
Cancer
I’ve taken agency in the treatment of my bone cancer (osteosarcoma in the T5 vertebrae of the upper spine). After I’ve ran out of standard of care treatment options and there were no trials available…
PTAB Affirms §101 Rejection of Psilocybin Composition, Post-Appeal Prosecution Results in Granted Patent
PTAB Finds that Psilocybin Formulation Is Not a Product of Nature, Further Prosecution Leads to Issued Patent