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Large health insurers are partnering with a little-known data company to boost their profits, often at the expense of patients and doctors, according to a New York Times investigation. A private equity-backed company called MultiPlan has helped reduce payments to health care providers and increase patient bills, earning billions of dollars in commissions for itself and insurers.To investigate this largely hidden aspect of the healthcare industry, the Times interviewed more than 100 patients, doctors, billing specialists, health plan consultants and former MultiPlan employees and reviewed more than 50,000 pages of documents, including confidential documents made public by two federal agencies. judges after the Times petitions.Here are five takeaways.The lower the compensation for doctors,...

Voters in Slovakia strengthened the grip of pro-Russian political forces in Central Europe on Saturday, handing victory in the presidential election to a candidate who opposes providing military and financial aid to Ukraine.With 99% of votes counted, the official tally showed Peter Pellegrini, an ally of populist Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, the winner with 53% of the vote in the presidential runoff. Despite the limited powers of the presidency in Slovakia, the elections were widely seen as a test of strength between political camps with sharply different views on Russia.The defeated candidate, former Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok, is a staunch supporter of Ukraine and critical of Fico, a combative veteran politician who aligned himself with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in o...

The race to lead artificial intelligence has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain such data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta cut corners, ignored company policies and debated how to change the law, according to a New York Times analysis.According to recordings of internal meetings obtained by the Times, last year managers, lawyers and engineers at Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, discussed buying the Simon & Schuster publishing house to procure long-form works. They also agreed to collect copyrighted data from across the Internet, even if it meant facing legal action. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.Like OpenAI, Google transcribed Y...

The Israeli army said Saturday it had recovered the body of a man taken hostage from one of the worst-hit communities during the Hamas-led attack on October 7, nearly six months after his abduction.The man, Elad Katzir, 47, was killed by his captors in mid-January while being held in Gaza by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said at a news conference on Saturday. Mr. Hagari cited multiple intelligence sources but provided no details. The Israeli military's claim that Mr. Katzir had been killed by his captors could not be independently verified.Mr. Katzir had lived in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the border with the Gaza Strip. According to the Israeli army, more than a quarter of more than 400 residents were killed or kidnapped in the att...

Als einer der führenden Anbieter von Gesundheitsdienstleistungen in Deutschland ist arztspezialist.de stolz darauf, hochwertige medizinische Versorgung anzubieten, um das Leben unserer Patienten zu verbessern. Unser Team von Fachärzten deckt eine Vielzahl von Fachgebieten ab, darunter Orthopädie Und Traumatologie, Andrologie, Dermatologie, Innere Medizin Innere Krankheiten, Haut, Psychologischer Berater, Klinischer Psychologe, Zahnarzt und Gehirn und Nervenchirurgie. In diesem Artikel werden wir näher auf die verschiedenen Bereiche eingehen, in denen wir tätig sind, und wie wir unseren Patienten helfen, ihre Gesundheitsziele zu erreichen. Orthopädie Und Traumatologie: Bewegungsfreiheit und Lebensqualität Die Orthopädie und Traumatologie ist ein Bereich der Medizin, der sich mit der D...

Historically speaking, it's not a bad time to be a teenager's liver. Or the lungs.Regular alcohol, tobacco, and drug use among high school students has seen a long downward trend.In 2023, 46% of older adults said they had had a drink in the year before being surveyed; that's a steep decline from 88% in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national survey of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and tenth graders and for these three age groups regarding cigarette smoking. In 2023, only 15% of older adults reported having smoked a cigarette in their lifetime, compared to a peak of 76% in 1977.Illicit drug use among adolescents has remained low and fairly stable over the past t...

Quando il padre di Diane Scheig, Bill, tornava a casa dal lavoro presso la fabbrica Mallinckrodt di St. Louis, si spogliava nel garage e consegnava i suoi vestiti alla madre di lei perché li lavasse immediatamente, senza osare contaminare la casa con i residui delle sue fatiche. .Il signor Scheig, un metalmeccanico che contribuì a costruire il famoso arco della città, non raccontò mai alla famiglia esattamente cosa stesse facendo nello stabilimento, dove gli scienziati iniziarono per la prima volta a lavorare l'uranio per il Progetto Manhattan nel 1942. Ma all'età di 49 anni, aveva sviluppato cancro ai reni, perse la capacità di camminare e morì.Decenni dopo, la sorella maggiore di Diane, Sheryle, che anni prima aveva dato alla luce un bambino nato con un tumore delle dimensioni di...

OpenAI, Google, and other tech companies train their chatbots with massive amounts of data collected from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories, and other sources on the Internet. But in the future they hope to use something called synthetic data.That's because tech companies may be running out of high-quality text the Internet has to offer for AI development. And companies are facing copyright lawsuits from authors, news organizations and computer programmers for using their works without permission. (In one of these lawsuits, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft.)According to them, synthetic data will help reduce copyright issues and increase the supply of training materials needed for artificial intelligence. Here's what to know about it.What is synthetic data?It i...

In the fall of 2016, the Obama administration signed a major military agreement with Israel that committed the United States to giving the country $38 billion in weapons over 10 years.“Continued delivery of the world's most advanced weapons technology will ensure that Israel has the ability to defend itself against all threats,” President Barack Obama said.The deal was not controversial at the time. It was a period of relative calm for Israel, and few officials in Washington expressed concern about how American weapons might one day be used.Now that military aid package, which guarantees Israel $3.3 billion a year for the purchase of weapons, along with another $500 million a year for missile defense, has become a flashpoint for the Biden administration. A minority of lawmakers in Co...

In 1817 James Parkinson expressed hope about the disease that bears his name. He thought that sooner or later there would be a discovery and “the progress of the disease could be stopped”.Now, nearly 200 years since Parkinson expressed his hope, and after four decades of unsuccessful clinical trials, a group of French researchers reports the first glimmer of success: a modest slowing of the disease in a year-long study.And the drug they used? A so-called GLP-1 receptor agonist, similar to the hugely popular drugs Ozempic, for diabetes, and Wegovy, for obesity.About half a million Americans have been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a degenerative brain disease second only to Alzheimer's in prevalence.Symptoms include tremors, slowness, stiffness and difficulty with balance. T...