Report on Health Care Regulations Subject to Review
Under limited circumstances, Congress may employ a rarely used process to overturn rules and regulations issued by federal agencies. In a new report, the Congressional Research Service describes how this process works and lists regulations that could be subject to [...]
Profile of Nominee to Head CMS
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Seema Verma, a health care consultant, to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. That agency runs the Medicare and Medicaid programs. In this capacity she would have enormous influence on [...]
Social Determinants and Health Care
Amid growing recognition that social factors play at least much a role in the health of communities as medical care, growing attention is being paid to how best to address those social determinants in a health care system. With increasing [...]
FAQ on New Medicaid Managed Care Rule
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published an FAQ on the new regulation that governs the use of managed care when serving Medicaid and CHIP populations. Go here to find that FAQ and other links to other resources [...]
HHS OIG Previews 2017 Interests
The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has published a document presenting the areas on which it intends to focus in 2017. Among the Medicaid issues on which the OIG will focus [...]
Retail Clinics Don’t Reduce Demand for ER Services
The presence of retail medical clinics near hospitals does not reduce the demand for low-acuity services at those hospitals’ emergency room. Or so reports a new study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Contrary to what was expected amid the [...]
MedPAC Still Unhappy With Doc Pay
Despite the recent regulation implemented by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to prevent hospitals from continuing to acquire physician practices so they can receive higher outpatient payments than those physicians receive in private practice, members of the Medicare [...]
MedPAC Meets
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission met in Washington, D.C. last week to discuss a number of issues on which it is contemplating advising Congress. Those issues were: the role of Medicare policy in provider consolidation stand-alone ERs payments from drug [...]
States Exploring Deviations from ACA Standards
A number of states are considering pursuing waivers from selected requirements of the Affordable Care Act in the name of health care innovation. Section 1332 of the 2010 health care reform law permits states, with federal approval, to implement different [...]
More Evidence Supports Shortcomings of Medicare Readmissions Penalties
A new study supports the belief that Medicare’s hospital readmissions reduction program is unfair to hospitals that serve especially large numbers of low-income patients. A study published in the journal Surgery found that hospitals that serve larger numbers of minority [...]
