Policy and Legislation
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will soon be outfitted with new state-of-the-art fraud fighting analytic tools to prevent wasteful and fraudulent payments in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has announced it will begin using Medicare's standard payment rates for certain medical procedures performed by non-VA providers on Feb. 16, 2011.
Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced new requirements for State Health Insurance Assistance Programs (SHIP) grants.
"Check Back in a Generation to See if the Health Law Withstands Challenge" suggests the New York Times in an insightful piece, which suggests Social Security as a useful comparison.
New data from the Standard & Poor's Healthcare Economic Composite Index indicates that the average per capita cost of healthcare services rose 6.70 percent over the 12 months ending October 2010, a deceleration from the 7.08 percent reported for the 12 months ending in September.
A recent survey by the National Senior Citizens Law Center found that many Medicare Advantage plans and Medicare Part D plans are not publishing marketing materials in Spanish as required by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid under their provider contracts.
Mercifully this year's political season came to a close with the November elections. For those who campaigned on an agenda of "taking back our government" - that would be the tea party movement - let's consider a dose of reality as it relates to government health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid.
The American Hospital Association is encouraging Congress to extend several tax provisions necessary to hospital capital financing.
Two items of interest concerning health care reform: one concerning repeal of an unpopular provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; the other a bi-partisan effort to allow states to opt-out of some of the health care reform law’s provisions.
It's amazing how much trouble a couple of hundred inexpensive health insurance policies can cause.