Chris Anderson
On the same day voters in Ohio were summarily rejecting by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, justices at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia weighed in with a ruling upholding the mandate as constitutional.
Bundling payments to providers as a means to cut healthcare costs is proving harder to do than originally anticipated, according to a new study from non-profit research organization Rand Corp.
A one-year-old accountable care organization established by Allina Hospitals & Clinic and payer HealthPartners has reported that it reduced medical cost by $6 million in 2010 and reduced the medical cost trend to 3 percent compared with 8 percent in 2009.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Thursday released the final regulations for accountable care organizations (ACOs), which contain major revisions from the draft regulations released earlier this year.
In early October the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an advisory panel that helps inform the government on preventive healthcare, downgraded its recommendation on the PSA test for prostate cancer screening to a grade of D. It recommended doctors not routinely prescribe the test because “there is moderate or high certainty that the service has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits.”
Partners HealthCare, a nine-hospital health system with 1,800 primary care physicians and more than 6,000 specialists, has agreed to join Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts' Alternative Quality Contract (AQC) global payment model beginning Jan. 1, 2012.
Georgia state officials are planning to implement a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act allowing states to move the children of state employees onto the Children's Health Insurance Program, something only a handful of states have done so far.
A much-anticipated report from the Institute of Medicine providing guidance to the Department of Health and Human Services on how to define essential health benefits came down squarely on the side of controlling the costs of providing those benefits with an emphasis on benefits that are effective and provide high value.
Humana Inc., one of the largest managed care organizations in the country has named McKesson executive Bruce D. Broussard as president and announced a succession plan that would see Broussard ascend to CEO at the retirement of current Chairman and CEO Mike McCallister, expected in the next 12 to 18 months.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced this week that it has awarded grants totaling more than $34 million in 2011 in the fight against healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).