Reimbursement

Oregon lawmakers agreed to an 11.5 percent cut in Medicaid payments to hospitals instead of the 19 percent cut requested by Gov. John Kitzhaber for the 2011-2013 budget.

In what he described as "both an opportunity and an obligation," Vermont Gov. Pete Shumlin has signed the country's first single-payer law, setting the state on a course to be first with a publicly financed healthcare system.

An annual review of the nation's health insurers by athenahealth and Physicians Practices has placed Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna at the top of the list.

In less than a decade, for-profit hospices have proliferated at an astounding rate, and that may be cause for concern, say the authors of "In the Business of Dying: Questioning the Commercialization of Hospice," a study released earlier this month in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

The sixth annual PayerView rankings place Aetna at top for performance across several survey segments. The PayerView Rankings are published each year by EHR company athenahealth and Physicians Practices, a practice management journal for physicians.

Based on its model of managing chronic illness and proactive health management, Healthstat has been selected by Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield to manage an on-site health clinic for employees and dependents covered under its health benefit plan.

Aetna and P4 Healthcare, a division of Cardinal Health, have announced an expansion of its evidence-based program to improve care by identifying and promoting best practices in the treatment of certain types of cancer.

Health insurance has long been a state affair in the USA. Insurance companies were even exempt from many aspects of federal anti-trust law to better enable state regulators to oversee their activities. Yes, there were federal laws that standardized certain aspects of the business--think HIPAA and COBRA. Think about Medicaid, Medicare and SCHIP while you're at it. But when it came to health insurance regulation the states reigned supreme.

Quest Diagnostics announced a $241 million settlement with California's Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, to settle a civil lawsuit that alleged overbilling of the program.