Attention shoppers: After today, for those whose employers don’t offer health insurance, there will only be seven shopping days left for coverage that starts on January 1, 2015.
December 15 is the last day you will be able to pick an Obamacare plan if you want to be insured beginning New Year’s Day.  If you’re like most folks, you’ll wait until close to the deadline to make a choice.

Don’t be like most folks.
If you don’t give yourself enough time to sort through the options available to you, you might wind up paying your insurance company a lot more than necessary — which is exactly what a lot of my former colleagues in the business are hoping for.

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One evening in February 1983, a medical resident named Hacib Aoun was working on a bone marrow transplant unit, taking care of a teenager with leukemia. The patient was hemorrhaging and required frequent transfusions and checks of his blood count. While performing one of these checks, Aoun cut his thumb on a glass capillary tube containing the patient’s blood.

Three weeks later, Aoun developed a rash, a sore throat, and a cough. He and his doctor chalked up the symptoms to “some virus.” Years afterward, Aoun wrote: “Little did we know how correct we were.”

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As the flu season gets underway over the next few weeks, public health officials have been preparing for a unique set of challenges. Some people are still looking for a last-minute flu shot due to delays in immunization shipments from two manufacturers, and those experiencing fever, aches, and fatigue from the flu may be more likely to head to the emergency room this year due to concerns about the Ebola virus, which causes similar symptoms.

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A colonoscopy is one of the most effective tests available to protect against a major cancer — a message heard by growing numbers of adults. But a recently published study revealed that some patients get the exam too often, exposing them to unneeded risks and raising costs.

The research, which looked at doctors and their patients in the Boston area, is part of a significant shift in how medical care is studied. Until recently, computerized medical records have been used mostly to study whether patients are failing to get important tests, such as mammograms to detect breast cancer and blood tests to check for high cholesterol.

But increasingly, providers are building more sophisticated electronic medical record systems that allow researchers to study when patients receive too many, rather than too few, medical procedures and tests.

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An experiment to improve care for thousands of Massachusetts’ sickest residents is proving more complex and expensive than health insurers and regulators envisioned, forcing the state and federal governments to shoulder more costs for the first-in-the nation program.
Called One Care, the initiative was designed to better coordinate health care services for about 95,000 disabled and low-income adults under age 65 when it launched last October. But the state’s latest count shows fewer than 18,000 enrolled, and officials have repeatedly declined to release detailed information about the program’s finances or the quality of patient care because they say they want to be able to analyze a year’s worth of data first.

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In 1984, Thanksgiving wasn’t even a thought at the home of Steve and Dyan Simon of Key Biscayne. The couple and their extended family were in a state of vigil, hoping tiny, precious PJ would survive.
Five days earlier, the Simons’ first child had entered the world eight weeks prematurely, weighing just 3 pounds, 4 ounces.

From his first breath, it had been touch and go. Then came the frightening big blow, delivered by a newly practicing radiologist working the holiday shift at Miami Children’s Hospital. Images showed that PJ was not only bleeding in his ventricles, where spinal fluid is made, but also was bleeding into his brain tissue, which leads to lasting brain damage.

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