Policy and Legislation
As financial pressures impinge the health care system, the various players sometimes seek legislation to protect their interests. I have heard of two such situations in Massachusetts, and I offer them for your consideration and your comments.
House Republicans voted yesterday to reject a Senate deal that would have extended the payroll tax break and unemployment benefits and provided physicians a reprieve on a 27.4 percent Medicare payment cut.
Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Pennsylvania will take part in the National Governors Association's collaborative to address chronic disease prevention. Chronic disease is a major contributor to rising healthcare costs, accounting for 84 percent of U.S. healthcare spending.
The re-named Advisory Panel on Hospital Outpatient Payments, or HOP, will hold its first semi-annual meeting for 2012 Feb. 27-29, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced last week.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced the 32 health systems that will participate in the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization program, which government officials say could save Medicare as much as $1.1 billion.
More than half of health system and insurance executives recently surveyed by KPMG, law firm Epstein Becker Green and The JHD Group indicated they are still undecided about whether their organizations will participate in the Medicare ACO program.
The Affordable Care Act gets its day in the Supreme Court, which will consider challenges to required insurance and expanded state Medicaid coverage.
High hospital readmission rates among Medicare patients are closely tied to higher overall hospital admission rates, according to a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
To understand just how problematic the current hospital drug shortage is, all you need to do is take a look at how it is impacting patients.
As President Barack Obama noted Thursday when introducing proposed regulations for minimum wage and overtime protection for home healthcare workers, the home healthcare workforce is the largest and fastest growing in the country. A new analysis finds that required training for some of these workers has gone largely unchanged in almost 25 years.