Group items tagged

The law provided the ONC with $2 billion to support development of a nationwide electronic health information system. Th

On the positive side, providers are clearly aware of and responding to the availability of incentives. Internal CMS surveys show that as of April 2011, 78% of physicians and 96% of hospital executives were aware of the meaningful-use program (Trudel K: personal communication). As Figure 1Figure 1Provider Registrations for Meaningful-Use Payments. shows, more than 114,000 eligible providers, or 21%, had registered for meaningful-use payments by the end of September 2011.11

he actions of these other employers don’t detract from the unique nature of Walgreens’ decision. Two months earlier, the retailer announced its partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services to extol the benefits of Obamacare to its employees and its customers. Their website still features the effort, and brochures continue to be distributed even while the corporation itself realizes that compliance must force it to abandon employer-provided health insurance for the people in the stores distributing the brochures to customers.

With the CBO predicting that rising health-care costs would increase at twice the rate of other federal spending, the same increase in costs will now be borne almost entirely by employees.  Finally, it appears that the private-exchange option will satisfy the employer mandate, which means that the employees cannot bail out of these private exchanges in order to qualify for federal subsidies, which prevents the employers from having to pay increasing fines for non-compliance.

limit the liability of the third-party payer.

“You lie!” in the middle of the president’s reassurances that unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. wouldn’t receive health benefits. It also included these fateful words: “The plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years—less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration.”