Policy and Legislation
Hospitals may have less control over readmissions than clinicians, administrators or federal regulators would like to believe, new research suggests, meaning that the readmissions penalties imposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services may be inappropriate.
As lawmakers try to understand the ultimate causes of the recent slowdown in healthcare spending growth, their determinations will eventually translate into policies that will impact healthcare businesses of all types.
Providers of Medicare Advantage and Part D plans: look out. Dozens of plans may soon be terminated.
The woman who became the face of the health law's troubled rollout last October is resigning her position as head of the country's Health and Human Services Department.
Medicare's release Wednesday of millions of records of payments made to the nation's doctors comes as the government is looking to find more cost-efficient ways to pay physicians and refashion the way the country's healthcare system is financed.
By releasing to the public a data set revealing what Medicare pays individual doctors, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says the transparency will help weed out fraud and prevent billing abuse, but physicians are crying foul.
Insurers offering Medicare Advantage plans got a bit of a reprieve this week when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gave them a rate increase instead of the expected cut. CMS' 2015 rate announcement also addressed concerns over provider terminations and beneficiary cost sharing.
When MedPAC recommended to Congress in March that readmission penalties similar to those imposed on hospitals be applied to home healthcare organizations, the home health industry didn’t balk because it has already been working toward reducing readmissions.
Health insurers offering Medicare Advantage plans may soon be feeling the effects of a court case in Connecticut.
Monday evening, the U.S. Senate managed to create an uproar in the healthcare community by passing a bill patching Medicare's pay rate for doctors instead of repealing it and delaying the ICD-10 compliance deadline.