Policy and Legislation

Hospices can now lose Medicare payments if they don’t file cost reports, and yet, because there are no penalties for inaccurate reporting, there is little motivation to spend much time on them.

Medicare regulators are updating hospital outpatient and ambulatory surgery center payments for next year, and also outlining a potential remedy to private Medicare overpayments.

A quarter of the nation's hospitals in October will receive lower Medicare payments because their rates of patient complications are higher than their peers. Here is an explanation of the three measures Medicare is using to calculate the hospital-acquired conditions scores.

Many questions remain on how specific details of the Affordable Care Act will be resolved, but one significant trend is clear: the shift toward risk sharing among patients, providers and insurers is well underway.

A quarter of the nation's hospitals, those with the worst rates of hospital-acquired conditions, will lose 1 percent of every Medicare payment for a year starting in October. The sanctions, estimated to total $330 million over a year, kick in at a time when most infections measured in hospitals are on the decline, but still too common.

MedPAC is out with its 15th annual mid-year report, offering advice for Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services to improve and sustain the senior's health program as it enrolls millions of retiring baby boomers. Here's what hospitals need to know about the commission's latest thinking.

One of the worst failures of the Affordable Care Act is that, even with subsidies, the premiums and out-of-pocket expenses are unaffordable for far too many people. Unfortunately, a new proposal for catastrophic plans with very high deductibles would make accessing healthcare truly unaffordable for even more people.

Hospital revenue fell in 2014's first quarter compared with the final three months of 2013, the Census Bureau estimated last week. And for a full year -- from Q1 2013 to Q1 2014 -- revenue for healthcare and social assistance rose only 2.9 percent.

The Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide coverage for full-time employees, but not part-timers. That sounds like a straightforward and reasonable provision, but as usual the devil is in the details.

Of the states that built their own health insurance exchanges that are now operational, Washington, Kentucky and Minnesota enjoyed some successes that might be replicated.