Reimbursement

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is currently assessing the impact of the partial government shutdown on the 2014 Medicare fee for service payment regulations, and intends to issue the final rules on or before November 27, 2013.

WellPoint reported third-quarter earnings that were about 5 percent lower than last year's period but still ahead of expectations due to lower medical costs and healthy membership, as it continues to make investments for insurance expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

For a sense of substance abuse treatment demand with new national essential health benefits, insurers should note the increase in services in states that enacted parity laws during the last decade.

Trends in health plan design, consumer utilization of healthcare services and the growing economy may indicate higher premiums on the way and potential changes for insurers' profits, according to an analysis by Aon Hewitt.

To lead a sort of tech worker surge and software code purge for Healthcare.gov, the Obama Administration has brought in a turnaround guy, Jeffrey Zients.

I will be happy to have the Obama Administration do these status reports any time they would like to take them over from me.

While estimating the cost of an ICD-10 transition may be scary, medical practices should perhaps be more worried about what could happen to revenue.

Mark Claster, vice chair of the Board of Trustees at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, says that, to drive growth, hospitals need to focus on cost control, value-based medicine and managing populations.

Hospitals are cutting their operating costs in order to adjust to reduced revenues as Medicare tightens payments.

As Medicare tightens payments to hospitals, they are cutting their operating costs in order to adjust to reduced revenues instead of shifting costs to private payers, as has been the common belief, a new study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) found.