Dear TxAAPS Members and Friends: Some hospitals are improperly circumventing the good bill enacted by the Texas Legislature in 2017 (SB 1148) intended to restrict hospitals and insurers from imposing counterproductive MOC requirements on physicians. This session Sen. Dawn Buckingham has introduced SB 1882 to help ensure hospitals follow the law. The bill was just […]
The Trump Administration is moving forward with implementation of the Blueprint to Lower Drug Prices it released last spring. Perhaps the most anticipated changes are policies that aim to curb the improper flow of kickbacks (aka rebates) to Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs). These “rebates” not only drive up prices but are used to steer patients to drugs with the […]
ACTION ALERT – Yes to HB 460 – Lower Rx Costs for Texas Patients HB 460, will allow Texas physicians the ability to dispense medications in their office. Nearly every other state permits physicians to help their patients save money and time in this way. Cost savings to the patient can be up to 95%. Here’s […]
“Drug shortages are pretty much a daily disaster right now for most hospitals,” reported Pharmacy Times on December 10. Meanwhile, “The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not just seeing an increase in drug shortages but also a spike in the intensity and duration of shortages,” writes Zachary Brennan, summarizing conclusions from an FDA […]
Earlier this fall the Internal Revenue Service, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Labor issued proposed rules that would increase the flexibility of Health Reimbursement Arrangements. Specifically, the rule would allow employees to use pre-tax employer funds to pay the premiums for individual plans and in some cases other […]
“Care Coordination” and “Value-Based Care” sound good, but leave it to DC and the managed-care cartels to turn innocuous sounding phrases into ideas that chiefly impose more top-down control and red tape instead of improving patient care. Apparently the federal Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS) stands in the way of Big Medicine’s “coordination” to trap patients in-network […]
“Differences in payment rates have unnecessarily shifted services away from the physician’s office to the higher paying hospital outpatient department,” admits CMS in the proposed 2019 rule for Medicare outpatient payment. CMS further reveals that payments made through Medicare’s Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS), “[have] been the fastest growing sector of Medicare payments out of […]
Proposed changes to rules governing how Medicare pays physicians in 2019 were released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) last month in a 1,472-page proposed rule known as CMS-1693-P. CMS says the proposal puts “Patients Over Paperwork” by ending the notorious AMA-designed Evaluation & Management (E&M) documentation “guidelines” that meld physicians to computer screens […]
An iPhone app consult with a nurse practitioner at the MinuteClinic will be your first stop for primary care if the CVS vision for the future of American medicine continues unabated. And managed care continues its takeover of Medicare and Medicaid as the programs speed towards insolvency. Is this the type of care you want for your children […]
Earlier this week we heard the good news that H.R. 365 was finally going to be considered by the House Committee on Ways and Means, bringing the use of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for Direct Patient Care (DPC) one step closer to reality. Then we learned “a few small changes” had been made to the […]