Medicare
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ICD-10: This Just Isn't How The Deal Should Go Down
ICD-10 has been the butt of countless jokes during the last several months but none so surprising as the latest one-liner. Only this isn’t funny.
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Immigrants Help Medicare Stay Solvent
Immigrants in the United States both legally and illegally are helping sustain Medicare, contributing about $14 billion more a year to the federal health program for the elderly than they use in medical services, a new study indicates. Read More »
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Important Deadlines Approaching For Meaningful Use Program
Meaningful use, the government program of financial rewards and penalties for encouraging doctors to use electronic health records (EHRs), has several important deadlines approaching. Read More »
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In Dire Health
Despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. medical system is near collapse. What will save it is a single-payer system and physicians in group practice.
Most people assume that insurance is an essential part of the health-care system. Some think it should be provided through public programs like Medicare, while others prefer to see it purchased from private insurance companies, but Read More »
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Industry Exclusive Interview: Todd Park, HHS's CTO
On Wednesday, Oct. 5, Todd Park, chief technology officer of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) helped open the Merge Live 2011 Client Conference, a user-group conference sponsored by the Chicago-based Merge Healthcare, and taking place this week at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in downtown Chicago. Read More »
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Industry Groups To Congress: 4 Ways To Prioritize Telehealth
A cadre of healthcare industry associations has called on Congress to prioritize telehealth and remote monitoring...
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Inside Big Pharma's Fight to Block Recreational Marijuana
Marijuana legalization will unleash misery on Arizona, according to a wave of television ads that started rolling out across the state last month. Replete with ominous music, the advertisements feature lawmakers and teachers who paint a bleak future for Arizona’s children if voters approve Proposition 205, a measure that would allow people aged 21 and over to possess an ounce of pot and grow up to six plants for recreational use. “Colorado schools were promised millions in new revenues” when the state approved recreational pot use, says the voiceover in one ad. Instead, schoolchildren were plagued by “marijuana edibles that look like candy”...
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Instead of Medicare for All, How about VA for All?
I wonder -- why would people be calling for a new system that would still have thousands of private hospitals/facilities and millions of healthcare professionals, practicing FFS medicine using countless systems and data structures? In short, why aren't people calling for VA for All? Like Medicare, the VA -- more especially, its healthcare component, the Veterans Health Administration -- is charged with providing healthcare to a designed population, in this case, veterans. Unlike Medicare, though, it does so as an integrated health system (by far the largest in the U.S.), with 170 VA Medical Centers, over a thousand outpatient facilities, and somewhere over 100,000 physicians...it offers some of the finest care in the world. It offers a range of services that Medicare can only dream of, and it does so at, it is believed, lower costs than private coverage or even Medicare. Plus, it also was an innovator in electronic health records and is today in telehealth. What's not to like?
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Integrated Telehealth and Care Management Program for Medicare Beneficiaries with Chronic Disease Linked to Savings
Treatment of chronically ill people constitutes nearly four-fifths of US health care spending, but it is hampered by a fragmented delivery system and discontinuities of care. We examined the impact of a care coordination approach called the Health Buddy Program, which integrates a telehealth tool with care management for chronically ill Medicare beneficiaries. Read More »
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Is Single-Payer the Right Payer?
As is customary for every administration in recent history, the Trump administration chose to impale itself on the national spear known as health care in America. The consequences so far are precisely as I expected, but one intriguing phenomenon is surprisingly beginning to emerge. People are starting to talk about single-payer. People who are not avowed socialists, people who benefit handsomely from the health care status quo seem to feel a need to address this four hundred pound gorilla, sitting patiently in a corner of our health care situation room. Why?
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Is the Administration Leaving a Promising Health Reform in the Cold?
How do these programs realize such savings? By doing a better job of caring for patients with multiple, chronic and often debilitating diseases. These are patients who regularly see multiple doctors and are in and out of emergency rooms and assisted living facilities. Instead of leaving these patients to fend for themselves, these programs send health care providers to their homes to check vital signs, organize pill bottles and coordinate the patient's overall care.
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Judgment Day: Dr. Margaret Flowers on What Follows the Supreme Court Ruling on Healthcare
Margaret Flowers, MD, is a pediatrician whose exasperation with the American healthcare system turned her into a single-payer activist. In 2009 she was arrested at the Senate Round Table on Health Insurance for attempting to speak on behalf of a single-payer plan when single-payer had been cut out of the conversation. Read More »
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Keeping Everyone in the Know: New CMS ADT Rule
On March 9, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule aimed at enhancing interoperability and increasing patient access to health information. This Final Rule contains a new Condition of Participation (CoP) that requires all hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and Critical Access Hospitals to electronically share (via an electronic health record [EHR] or another electronic administrative system) event notifications (also referred as e-notifications) with other providers across the continuum of care. These event notifications should occur whenever patients have an emergency department (ED) or inpatient admission, discharges, or transfers (also known as ADTs) in community hospitals.
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Kludgeocracy In America
In recent decades, American politics has been dominated, at least rhetorically, by a battle over the size of government. But that is not what the next few decades of our politics will be about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will define our major debates will concern the complexity of government, rather than its sheer scope...
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Latest Hospital Closing A Blow To Rural Residents
Charlton Memorial Hospital in southeast Georgia, which will suspend operations Friday, is set to become the third rural hospital in the state to close this year. Read More »
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