“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 […]
“The Direct Primary Care (DPC) model is burgeoning as patients yearn for quality time with their doctor at an affordable price,” writes Marilyn Singleton, MD, JD in a recent oped. But can the success of DPC help the Medicare program improve patient access to care while lowering costs? The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) has […]
Some of the worst features of ACA—the individual mandate penalty and Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)—are being relegated to the trash heap of policy failures and states are working to open escape hatches to alternatives outside of DC’s reach. We celebrate these needed changes; however, additional reform is vitally needed to expand patients’ options for access […]
Now that the ACA individual mandate penalty is about to be relegated to the trash heap of policy failures, additional reform is vitally needed to expand patients’ options for access to high-quality, lower-cost medical care. Opportunity knocks for taking the next step: in the coming days and weeks Congress will be considering and passing year-end spending and extender […]