Healthcare Finance Staff
"The man behind the curtain needs to be exposed" seems to be the sentiment echoed by many critics of today's hospital pricing strategy. Writing in a recent issue of JAMA, Uwe Reinhardt, PhD, a political economist based at Princeton University, put it more bluntly: "Until recently, healthcare in the United States was delivered behind the secure walls of a fortress that kept information on the prices charged for healthcare and the quality of that care opaque from public view."
National health spending in 2012 increased at a 3.7 percent rate to $2.8 trillion, the fourth consecutive year of slow growth, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in an analysis.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is proposing a number of new tweaks and more stringent requirements for Medicare Part D, hoping to save more than $1 billion over five years.
While many states are still trying to establish the core services of their health insurance marketplace, some exchanges are already setting a blueprint for business opportunities beyond a platform that enables shopping for and purchasing health coverage.
Recent court decisions in Michigan are making the issue of public employee benefits restructuring even more murky for states and local governments, and potentially adding more reasons for the Supreme Court to weigh in.
More than 10,000 Colorado state employees have participated in wellness activities in a health incentive program since July, with one half of them having completed a health risk assessment.
Nearly four years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law promising the biggest expansion of health care coverage in half a century, the public remains deeply split over it.
The Department of Health and Human Services is getting ready to enforce the Affordable Care Act's attempts to reduce administrative costs, with proposed regulations of health plans.
Even as total Medicare Part D spending grows, generic competition and copay variation have yielded a sustainable rate of per capita cost growth, according to federal Medicare researchers.
As new federal market stabilization programs start, many regulators and insurers are preparing for a new model of risk management: "when adverse selection isn't."