Group items tagged

"These findings are an important step in understanding where primary care practices and medical home programs can be most effective in making changes to enhance access."

"Private insurance companies that participate in Medicare under the Medicare Advantage program and its predecessors have cost the publicly funded program for the elderly and disabled an extra $282.6 billion since 1985, most of it over the past eight years. In 2012 alone, private insurers were overpaid $34.1 billion. "That's wasted money that should have been spent on improving patient care, shoring up Medicare's trust fund or reducing the federal deficit, the researchers say."

"Hospitals that take part in CMS' Inpatient Quality Reporting Program will receive 0.8% in extra payments, while those not successfully participating would have payments reduced by 2%, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed on Friday to the USA's 3,400 acute care hospitals."

No, these two women were, as far as I can tell, offered help but refused it because it was standard conventional therapy. From what I can tell from various blog and Internet articles, they appear to have subjected Alex to biomedical quackery and were unhappy that if Alex were transferred to a psychiatric hospital's long-term care ward he would no longer be able to receive "autism biomed" treatments. Time and investigation by the authorities will tell if that was the case.

"Despite the overwhelmingly critical and hostile reaction, this reform to our healthcare system is not poised to wreak the havoc on American small businesses that the opposition is charging."

Sec. 2607 is of concern to advocates of science-based medicine due to the broad scope of practice granted chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists and direct-entry midwives under state law, as well as their over-confident view of themselves and their abilities. As we have previously discussed, for example, both naturopaths and chiropractors fancy themselves as primary care physicians able to differentially diagnose any patient with any disease or condition and, in many cases, treat or "co-manage" these patients.

Currently, readmissions for Medicare patients alone cost $26 billion annually. About $17 billion of that could be avoided if patients received the right care from the start, according to a February 2013 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began cutting one percent of reimbursements for 30-day readmissions among Medicare patients. That penalty is expected to increase to two percent in 2014 and three percent in 2015.

... patients with complications cost more to treat -- they spend more time in the hospital and require resources like nurses and beds. But the study found that these patients didn't simply cost more to treat, ... the majority of them generated a much larger profit for hospitals.

The first issue is available for free on ScienceDirect: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22130764

"These findings suggest that high teaching intensity and safety-net institutions may be disproportionately affected by recent and upcoming changes in hospital payment models."