A new Senate proposal would change how the federal government allocates Medicaid disproportionate share money (Medicaid DSH) to the states. The State Accountability, Flexibility, and Equity (SAFE) for Hospitals Act, introduced by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), seeks to …create equity for all states by updating a metric used to determine how much each state is […]
Last week the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission met in Washington, D.C. and one of the subjects on its agenda was Medicaid DSH. The Affordable Care Act mandated major reductions of Medicaid disproportionate share (Medicaid DSH) allotments to states and those reductions have been delayed by Congress several times but are now scheduled […]
Every year the Congressional Budget Office publishes a menu of options for reducing federal spending and the federal budget deficit. As in the past, this year’s compendium includes a number of options to reduce federal health care spending and raises federal revenue through health care initiatives. The cost-cutting options include: establish caps on federal spending […]
Medicare would permit nurse practitioners and physician assistants to bill directly for their services under a proposal being considered by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Currently such services are billed as “incident to” physician services, but according to a report in Becker’s Hospital Review, MedPAC staff told commissioners there are problems with “incident to” billing […]
Last week the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission met in Washington, D.C. to discuss a number of Medicare payment issues. The issues on MedPAC’s December agenda were: Medicare payments for physician and other health professionals services payments for ambulatory surgical centers payments for hospital inpatient and outpatient care Medicare’s hospital quality incentive program payments for skilled […]
People living in low-income communities wait about four minutes longer for ambulances to respond to their call for help when they are having a heart attack, a new study has found. In communities with annual median incomes between $57,000 and $113,000, the study found that ambulances arrive in an average of 37.5 minutes – faster […]
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has introduced four new “state relief and empowerment waivers” that are widely viewed as new vehicles for states to circumvent Affordable Care Act requirements to implement their own new approaches to health care. Through “account-based subsidies” waivers, states may direct public subsidies into defined-contribution, consumer-directed accounts that individuals […]
For the first time since 2008, the number of uninsured children in the U.S. increased in 2017, according to a new report from the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. While the total increase in the number of uninsured children is small – just 276,000 – 2017 marked the first time in nearly a decade that […]