Medicaid Expansion Helping Diabetics
The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion has led to a 40 percent increase in the number of prescriptions for diabetes medicine filled in the 30 states that expanded their Medicaid programs. Meanwhile, there was no change in the number of [...]
Medicare Announces FY 2019 Inpatient Payments
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has released its FY 2019 payment schedule for Medicare inpatient services. Highlights of the FY 2019 inpatient prospective payment system regulation include: A 1.75 percent increase in fee-for-service rates. A $1.5 billion increase [...]
Battle Over Medicaid Work Requirements Not Over
The Secretary of Health and Human Services is not accepting a recent federal court ruling as the final word on Medicaid work requirements. Although the court ruled against a federally approved plan to permit the state of Kentucky to implement [...]
GAO Looks at Medicaid Managed Care Spending
The federal government should do more to help states ensure the accuracy and integrity of their payments to Medicaid managed care organizations and the payments those Medicaid managed care organizations make to health care providers. This is the conclusion reached [...]
New Reg Pushes Medicare Toward Site-Neutral Outpatient Payments
Medicare would make more payments for outpatient services on a site-neutral basis under a newly proposed regulation just released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The 2019 Medicare outpatient prospective payment system regulation, published in proposal form, calls [...]
Pay Raise Didn’t Lead More Docs to Participate in Medicaid
The temporary rate increase that the Affordable Care Act provided as means of encouraging more doctors to serve Medicaid patients did not work, according to two new studies published in the journal Health Affairs. According to the studies, the increase [...]
CMS: Not Done With Medicaid Work Requirements
Despite the ruling of a federal court that Kentucky’s new Medicaid work requirement violates federal law, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has not ruled out approving future requests from state governments to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. [...]
CMS Proposes Changes in Medicare Physician Payments
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published a proposed regulation that it says …proposed historic changes that would increase the amount of time that doctors and other clinicians can spend with their patients by reducing the burden of [...]
HHS Chief Says 340B Changes are Coming
Health care providers and drug manufacturers should expect changes in the section 340B prescription drug discount program in the near future. That was the message conveyed by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar during a recent conference held by [...]
New Policy Threatens Provider Medicaid Payments
Health care providers that fail to join the provider networks of Missouri Medicaid managed care plans will see their Medicaid payments cut 10 percent by the state under a new state policy. The purpose of the policy, according to the [...]
