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The Boss Can Force You To Buy Company's Health Insurance

Under the federal health law, employers with 100 or more full-time workers can enroll them in the company plan without their say as long as the coverage is deemed affordable and adequate.

Maybe You Should Skip That Annual Physical

Americans spend billions of dollars every year on annual physicals. But there's little evidence that a yearly checkup helps healthy adults. Some doctors are telling patients to skip it.

Caryn Hoadley, 45, from Alameda, Calif., with her two children. Hoadley received a letter that said her mammogram was clean but that she has dense breast tissue, which has been linked to higher rates of breast cancer

Letters About Dense Breasts Can Lead To More Questions Than Answers

Nearly half the states in the U.S. require that women be notified if mammograms detect that they have dense breasts. Critics say the information raises anxiety more than it improves care.

Taking a pill for cancer can cost patients more than getting chemotherapy by IV.

Cost Of Cancer Pills Can Be Hard For Medicare Patients To Swallow

How some insurers pay for treatments means that cancer pills can wind up costing a patient more than an IV. Some states have passed laws to make sure that patients don't have to pay more to take pills. But those laws don't apply to Medicare.

Premature births are lowest in countries that are green. Red signals those with the worst problems.

In Global Rankings, US Fares Poorly On Premature Births

Babies are born too soon at a higher rate in the United States than in 125 other countries. The first worldwide rankings of preterm births show the problem isn't limited to the developing world.

Build a cardiac catheterization lab and doctors will tend to use it, even if treatment with drugs alone would suffice.

Costly Heart Procedures Thrive In Some Places, Despite Cheaper Alternatives

In Michigan, areas with more cardiac catheterization labs — places where patients are diagnosed for heart problems — tended to have more interventions than those with fewer labs.

A bottle of beer, seen on the the roof of a car at a DUI checkpoint in Miami, can create snags for health insurance coverage of accident care in some states.

Alcohol And Health Insurance Don't Always Mix

Under some state laws, a patient's positive test for alcohol can mean that insurers won't pay hospitals and doctors for care after an accident. To sidestep the potential problem, hospitals often don't screen patients for alcohol use.

Lori Duff with her baby, Henry, and other son, Logan, at home in Columbus, Ohio.

Nonprofit Hospitals Faulted For Stinginess With Charity Care

Nonprofit hospitals pay no federal, state, or local taxes. In return, they are expected to offer a community benefit, including free and discounted care for low-income patients. But a study by the Congressional Budget Office found that, on average, not-for-profits are providing only slightly more uncompensated care than for-profit hospitals.

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless runs the Stout Street Clinic in Denver, helped Dale Miller get a CT scan.

Colorado Extends Medicaid To Some Adults Without Kids

The state is one of just a few that is expanding Medicaid ahead of a major expansion called for in 2014 by the federal health law. Though the state estimates that 50,000 people meet the income bar, Colorado will only be able to offer coverage to 10,000 people.

Branded: Hospitals in McAllen, Texas, may not be as costly as first thought.

Recalculating The Health Bill In McAllen, Texas

The government has identified hundreds of hospitals where Medicare patients are incurring especially high or low bills. Hospitals around McAllen, it turns out, aren't as terrible as they were made out to be, according to Medicare's calculations of how much it spent for the average patient from three days before admission to a month after discharge.

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