Reimbursement

The American Medical Association has joined 65 national physician organizations in urging Congress to stop the 30 percent Medicare pay cuts to take effect at the end of the year.

There’s never a dull moment with healthcare reform.

Patient bad debt is becoming a serious threat to profitability at healthcare organizations nationwide, representing an estimated $65 billion in uncollected revenues in 2010. And, while self-pay patients do account for some of this debt, insured patients who neglect to pay balances after the payer pays its portion represent the fastest growing segment of individuals with outstanding medical bills.

Back in March, on the day he signed the healthcare overhaul into law, President Obama conceded that the administration still had a lot of educating to do.


The Medagate Corporation, a provider of healthcare benefit services, has announced a partnership with pre-paid card and transaction processing company InComm to launch the OTCNetwork, a national over-the-counter benefits disbursement and redemption network for Medicare Advantage plan members.

"Consumers are searching for plans that do more than just pay their medical bills," says an official with Wisconsin's Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which has launched Anthem Blue Rewards.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has lots of what can objectively be called "patient protections" - at least if one defines "health insurance policyholders” as patients. But most objective observers - and quite a few of the more biased ones - will agree that the PPACA focuses more on health insurance reform than health care reform.

Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans, says improvements in healthcare access may come at the expense of cost containment and quality as reform moves forward.

One of the largest recent security breaches of personal health information (PHI), involving 280,000 individuals, is on the surface a "pretty low-risk scenario," says one privacy expert.

Pedro do la Torre explains why the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act was packaged with healthcare reform legislation in this video from the Center for American Progress' YouTube channel.