Health Care

'The Line Starts Over There" reads a sign in Highland Hospital's emergency waiting room. This sort of shuffle is all too familiar for the mostly unemployed, uninsured patients who end up at the Oakland, Calif., facility. As one of its overworked physicians explains, the public service center is a place of last resort. Peter Nicks' documentary The Waiting Room shines a light on the darkest corners of the American health-care system. Its patrons are poor, unemployed, uninsured, and sick - a worst-case scenario.

Some Americans' insurance bills could double next year as the health-care overhaul law expands coverage to millions of people. The nation's big health insurers say they expect premiums to rise between 20 and 100 percent for millions of people because of changes that will occur when key provisions of the Affordable Care Act take effect in January 2014. Mark Bertolini, chief executive of Aetna Inc., one of the nation's largest insurers, calls the price increases "premium rate shock.

Two South Jersey home care companies merged last month to form Home to Stay L.L.C., a Cherry Hill firm with 150 employees and 125 clients, the company said. Assisted Living at Home, the larger company, with 80 clients, bought Home to Stay Health Care Solutions for an undisclosed amount. The deal was completed on Feb. 17. Home to Stay serves the elderly and the disabled in Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, Salem, Cumberland, Ocean, Mercer, Atlantic and Cape May Counties, the company said.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) took aim at federal spending Thursday, at one point singling out welfare programs he said had grown so generous that some Americans find they benefit from government aid "as long as you don't work very much. " Less than 24 hours after dining with President Obama and expressing hope that they could find "common ground" for a broad budget deal, Toomey used a 20-minute speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation to argue that shrinking government was the key to creating economic vitality, even if it required Republicans to "fight on" in repeated political battles like the one that just ended over the so-called sequester.

NEW YORK - General Electric Co. chief executive officer Jeff Immelt, whose company sells medical technology but also spends $3 billion a year on employee health-care costs, said individual Americans must bear greater responsibility for their health and pay more for care. "We don't have enough conversations in the United States - because the minute your words leave your mouth, it becomes highly political - about how we'll never bend the cost curve until we get more consumer skin in the game," Immelt said Thursday in the opening session of the Wharton Economic Summit 2013 at Jazz Lincoln Center.

Natalie Ross, who is prone to bronchitis, can tell you how her life is different without adultBasic: She put off seeing a doctor in January until her cough got so bad she was almost throwing up. With medication, the cough is better but still there. Her new health insurance covers just four office visits a year. "Should I go use another visit because it hasn't gone away? I don't want to waste my second doctor visit because I could potentially need it at the end of the year," said Ross, 33, a nanny in South Philadelphia who regularly picks up infections from her 4-year-old charge.

GOV. CORBETT can't have been feeling too well after learning that a Commonwealth Court judge found that his actions in diverting money from tobacco-settlement-funded adultBasic and Medicaid programs was unconstitutional. But he doesn't have to worry about getting too ill, since he shares a very generous health-care package with his colleagues in Harrisburg. Meanwhile, the programs that Corbett wrongly gutted in 2011 include a plan that allowed uninsured workers who make too much to qualify for Medicaid to enroll in a low-cost program.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) took aim at federal spending Thursday, at one point singling out welfare programs he said had grown so generous that some Americans find they benefit from government aid "as long as you don't work very much. " Less than 24 hours after dining with President Obama and expressing hope that they could find "common ground" for a broad budget deal, Toomey used a 20-minute speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation to argue that shrinking government was the key to creating economic vitality, even if it required Republicans to "fight on" in repeated political battles like the one that just ended over the so-called sequester.

HARRISBURG - A state judge has ordered the Corbett administration to reinstate funding for programs that provided health insurance to tens of thousands of low-income Pennsylvanians. In his ruling Tuesday, Commonwealth Court President Judge Dan Pellegrini found that two statutes that stripped money from the adultBasic and Medicaid programs were unconstitutional because they diverted money from the federal tobacco settlement to finance items other than health care in the general budget.

Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letter is much followed by investors, and the latest version does not include Johnson & Johnson for the first time since 2005. The letter, released over the weekend, lists the companies in which the billionaire or Berkshire Hathaway, of which he is chairman, hold at least $1 billion in stock. With product recalls, patient lawsuits, and a federal investigation pending, Buffett was critical of J&J in February 2012 when he discussed his annual letter, telling CNBC that the health-care giant "obviously messed up in a lot of ways in the last few years.