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 [...]
Feds to Target Urban Areas for Health Insurance Open Enrollment
As part of a campaign to encourage more Americans to obtain health insurance during the open enrollment period of the federal insurance marketplace and state marketplaces, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has identified 15 large urban markets where [...]
Hospital Bad Debt Up in Ohio
While uncompensated care is down, bad debt is up at Ohio hospitals. According to a new report from the Ohio Hospital Association, hospital bad debt rose in that state from $1.04 billion in FY 2013, when the state had not [...]
Medicaid Expansion Improved Hospital Finances
Hospitals in states that expanded their Medicaid programs as provided for in the Affordable Care Act experienced increased Medicaid revenue, reduced uncompensated care costs, and higher profit margins compared to hospitals in states that did not expand their Medicaid programs. [...]
Medicare’s Primary Care Demonstration Shows Promise
Medicare’s Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative produced encouraging results during its second year: 95 percent of the participating medical practices met their quality requirements and four out of the seven participating regions generated nearly $58 million in savings and will share [...]
Academies Continues Work on Socio-Economic Risk Adjustment
In the latest aspect of its research on socio-economic status for the purpose of its application to Medicare quality measurement and payment programs, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has taken a look at the data needed to [...]
