Tag: "Medicare"

Paying Hospitals to Be Nice

Special air-blowing vests keep patients warm pre-surgery. Private rooms are the norm. Staffers regularly check in with patients to anticipate their toilet and showering needs to cut down on call-light usage. Patients are given clear discharge instructions. Cleaning is no longer done at night. Patients are taught the difference between “pain-free” and “pain-controlled.”

The reason for these changes at Providence Park and similar ones at other hospitals across the country is to ensure high scores on patient satisfaction surveys, the results of which will affect Medicare reimbursement rates, starting next year.

At issue are millions of dollars annually, all the more significant as the industry sees so many other dollars slipping away. In fiscal year 2013, for example, the pot is $964 million, according to the federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Source: USA Today.

Jan 11, 2013 | 8 comments | by

Costly Breast Cancer Screenings, and Other Links

Medicare spends about $1.08 billion annually on breast cancer screenings, almost as much as the $1.36 billion it spends to treat the disease.

Strange NYT headline: Despite new health law, some see sharp rise in premiums.

Wake up to the New York Times: Aetna’s CEO predicted this last month – because of the ACA, not in spite of.

Jan 10, 2013 | 5 comments | by

Being Overweight = Longer Life + Higher Medical Bills

Re: last week’s finding that overweight people may live longer. Here’s the rest of the story:

“The study looked at quantity of life, not quality of life, and that’s a very important distinction,” noted Dana Goldman, director of the University of Southern California’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.

A higher body mass index — a standard measure for determining whether people are overweight or obese — is associated with a number of chronic illnesses, including diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. These chronic illnesses are expensive to treat. If, as it now turns out, overweight people are living longer in addition to racking up more chronic illnesses, that means Medicare is on the hook for paying for more expensive people for more years.

Catherine Rampell. Critique of the study here. A defense of fat here.

Jan 09, 2013 | 5 comments | by

Bad News on Social Security, and Other Links

Some bad news on Social Security.

How Medicare measures hospital quality.

Socrates to be retried in front of Judge Posner.

The world’s capital markets are 3 ½ times the size of the world’s GDP.

Jan 09, 2013 | 5 comments | by

Baker on Medical Tourism, and Other Links

Dean Baker discovers medical tourism and explains how it could save billions for Medicare.

Kling critiques Priceless: Neither Cochrane nor Goodman addresses the arguments for intervention by Arrow and Stiglitz.

Can expressing anger increase your life span?

Study: being neurotic is not all bad.

Jan 02, 2013 | 9 comments | by

Top 10 Posts from 2012

  1. Did the Election Save ObamaCare?
  2. Bernie Madoff Accounting for Medicare
  3. Troubles Ahead, Troubles Behind (Greg Scandlen)
  4. Is Fee-for-Service the Problem? (Greg Scandlen)
  5. How Not to Think About Health Care
  6. Hypocrisy on Medicare Reform
  7. What’s Wrong with the Health Care Media?
  8. Paul Krugman Doesn’t Have Private Health Insurance
  9. The Anti-Capitalist Mentality
  10. Health Spending Slows, While Premium Growth Accelerates (John R. Graham)
Jan 02, 2013 | 7 comments | by

Updates from Citizen’s Council, and Other Links

Citizen’s Council for Health Freedom has an update on what all the states are doing re: health insurance exchanges.

Some Medicare Advantage plans are creating their own primary care clinics.

WellPoint will offer a new service in all of its plans: Patients will be able to consult with physicians on-demand, using laptop webcams or video-enabled tablets and smartphones.

Dec 28, 2012 | 8 comments | by

I Don’t Have Any Faith in This System

Medicare on Thursday disclosed bonuses and penalties for nearly 3,000 hospitals as it ties almost $1 billion in payments to the quality of care provided to patients. New York-Presbyterian in Manhattan and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston will get paid less by Medicare. The Cleveland Clinic and Intermountain Medical Center in Utah will be paid more. Kaiser Health News reports:

Results for hospitals within the same system often varied. For instance, in Rochester, Minn., the Mayo Clinic’s Methodist Hospital will be getting a bonus. But Mayo’s flagship St. Mary’s Hospital, also in Rochester, will be losing money. Dr. Michael Rock, an orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, said that Medicare’s scoring system tends to favor hospitals with patients like those at Methodist, which primarily does elective surgeries, over hospitals with lots of trauma and emergency cases, which St. Mary’s handles.

Dec 26, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Ah, the Bureaucracy

Of the 1.1 billion claims submitted to Medicare in 2010 for hospitalizations, nursing home care, doctor’s visits, tests and physical therapy, 117 million were denied. Of those, only 2 percent were appealed.

More from Susan Jaffe from the Kaiser Health News.

Dec 21, 2012 | 6 comments | by

Question: Why Did Anyone Ever Believe in ACOs?

The evidence reviewed above suggests that components of accountable care organizations have limited and uncertain impact, especially on cost savings, and thus provide little support for the two postulates mentioned above: that better care coordination will improve quality at any given cost, and that the organizations will lower Medicare’s rate of spending growth.

Lawton Burns and Mark Pauly in Health Affairs.

Dec 13, 2012 | 7 comments | by
« Previous Page — Next Page »