Healthcare Finance Staff

The CY 2015 final rule for the home health prospective payment system updates Medicare payment rates to home health agencies, and implements the second year of the four-year phase in of the rebasing of the payment system.

Embracing consumer-oriented healthcare, some providers are voluntarily adopting price transparency, while some insurers balk at proposed mandates to disclose their rates.

For now at least, the employer mandate isn't going anywhere. But small businesses are flocking to a new market, leaving behind traditional models.

Every organization looking at someone else's business thinks there is a tremendous amount of waste, and believes they could do it better if given the opportunity. This is just as true in healthcare as any other industry.

In the last few weeks there's been good, bad and ugly news for Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. On one hand, the program has never been stronger and quality metrics are surging in the right direction; on the other, the industry is sucking it up on following the rules of its biggest customer, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Many health insurers have spent close to a century operating under fee-for-service and are now changing course. Some new payers founded post-health reform, however, are trying to hit the value-based ground running.

Of all the things to try to build a better business for in healthcare, the nation's fourth-largest Blue Cross insurer is focusing on one of life's most crucial processes.

Encouraging employer programs for health and prevention with one hand, the federal government is trying with the other hand to stake out a limit to what can be required of employees. And it's getting a bit fractious in the wellness space.

Figuring out when members are covered by different types of insurance can be a struggle, or not even possible. It's a source of waste and confusion that some insurers are trying to root out.

UnitedHealth continued its shopping spree on Tuesday with Optum, the group's technology and services subsidiary, agreeing to pay $600 million to acquire Alere Inc.'s condition management and wellness subsidiaries.