Reimbursement

With the Supreme Court just two months away from hearing a historic legal challenge to the 2010 health law, nearly 60 percent of the public expects the justices to depend more on personal ideology than a legal analysis of the individual mandate, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's January health tracking poll.

Neither President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, nor Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, in his Republican response, said very much about healthcare.

One of the critical challenges to the successful adoption of patient-centered healthcare is ensuring that the patient adheres to his or her medication requirements. This means taking the right mediation in the right dose at the right time, with the right outcomes.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is filling in more details about how physicians and hospitals may appeal decisions that prevent them from receiving or keeping payment as part of the EHR Incentive Program.

The American Medical Society sent Congress a letter yesterday urging lawmakers to use excess baseline budget projections for military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan to fix Medicare's sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula and avert a 27 percent cut to physician payments set to begin on March 1.

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has released for public comment a first draft of its national priorities for research and research agenda. The research requires the use of electronic health records, much in the way accountable care organizations use health data to improve care. The outcomes are conveyed to physicians electronically.

Telehealth services offer substantial opportunities for healthcare cost savings, as well as a proven effectiveness with improving patient care, particularly in rural areas. However, to get the most bang for the buck, there is still much work that needs to be done. Fred Pennic offers five key thoughts on telehealth's expansion.

In the 1952 Florida Senate race, George Smathers campaigned against incumbent Claude Pepper in the democratic primary, using this characterization attributed by journalists of the day as key to his win: "Are you aware that the candidate is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to have practiced nepotism with his sister-in-law... He matriculated with co-eds at the University, and it is an established fact that before his marriage he habitually practiced celibacy."

Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund and a nationally recognized economist, has a bone to pick with the federal government's recent report on U.S. healthcare spending.

South Carolina has received kudos for improving its methods to expand and retain eligible children in Medicaid by using information from other safety-net programs, such as food stamps, for enrollment.