Medicare & Medicaid
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it will delay releasing data on its risk corridor ratios for insurers participating in health insurance exchanges after it found several discrepancies in the data.
The program saved $580 million in nine markets in the first round of bidding, which ended in 2013, and an additional $2 billion in the second round, which ended in July 2014.
These awards build on the $101 million awarded to 164 new health center sites in May 2015, bringing the total to 700 sites established with Affordable Care Act funding.
An estimated 45,000 American adults die each year because they have no health insurance, according a 2009 study in the American Journal of Public Health.
Iowa's governor, Republican Terry Branstad, is moving full speed ahead with a plan to put private companies in charge of managing Medicaid's services.
Medicaid paid $7.4 million to 94 providers for services performed by providers that had been barred for reasons such as fraud, waste or quality.
The overwhelming majority of patients were not homebound and did not need home health services, according to authorities.
The worst-offending hospitals will see their Medicare reimbursements slashed by as much as 3 percent, though many on the list will be penalized less than 1 percent.
Last December, a 37-year-old patient with dissociative disorder died after hanging herself with a bedsheet and closet doorknob, a suicide that could have been prevented if Timberlawn used best practices.
Since the fines began, national readmission rates have dropped, but roughly one of every five Medicare patients sent to the hospital ends up returning within a month.