Medicare reimbursement mini-roundup — Doctors will get a 1.1 percent bump in Medicare payments starting in January, and additional bonuses for using e-prescribing technology. Meanwhile, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services will hike hospital outpatient payments by 3.6 percent, but held rates for ambulatory surgical centers flat. And CMS decided not to finalize profit-sharing...
Health Care Industry Archive
October 2008
In the high-stakes battle over a new diagnosis and procedure coding system for the U.S. health care industry, hospitals are pitted against physicians, who are allied (gulp) with health insurers. That’s right! Despite the longstanding hostility between doctors and managed-care plans, 10 physician and medical practice societies, including the AMA and the Medical Group Management Association,...
Aetna takes an investment hit from financial crisis — The health-insurance giant said it lost $120 million in its investment portfolio due to widening credit spreads on its fixed-income investments, and took another $70 million hit from its holdings of debt securities issued by the now-defunct Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. It also sold $42 million worth of securities at a loss....
Unlike its health-insurance competitor WellPoint, which looks to be ceding its turf in the management of government-sponsored health plans as quickly as it can, Humana remains heavily dependent on managing Medicare and Medicaid plans that account for close to 70 percent of its total membership. And it has a new strategy for extracting maximum profit from this setup while the getting is good, by...
Although coverage of WellPoint’s third-quarter earnings were dominated by a $562.6 million in investment losses — largely related to its investments in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman Brothers — and a relatively minor 5.4 percent drop in net income, the more important news for the nation’s largest health-insurance firm resided in the details of its earnings...
Humana, UnitedHealth call for caps on Medicare Advantage commissions — Insurance agents who enroll seniors in Medicare Advantage plans –which are subsidized by the government but offered by private health-insurance plans — are getting sizeable commissions from those insurers. Medicare will look into the commissions and whether they prompt overzealous selling of the plans. Some...
Lack the time or patience to plow through the just-concluded three-part, 5,000-word-plus LA Times series on what’s wrong with the health-insurance industry? Allow me to assist with this abbreviated guide to the key ideas and data points in the series, stripped of the touching personal anecdotes, Byzantine logic and wandering narrative style for which the LAT is justly famous. Read this...
Recruiting “celebrity” professors has become de rigueur at top business schools, and Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management continues the trend with the addition of former United States Senate Majority Leader and transplant surgeon Bill Frist, M.D. Slated to begin next semester, Frist’s class will combine business students with fourth-year medical students to scrutinize the...
For the third quarter in a row, unexpectedly high medical costs appear to have taken the management of Coventry Health Care by surprise. The cost, this time, was severe: shares of the health-insurance firm lost more than half their value today, meaning that while Coventry was worth more than $4 billion yesterday, today it’s valued at only a little more than $2 billion. Among other...
Aetna ties up with Microsoft online-health records — The big health-insurance firm Aetna said it will start allowing many of its members to transfer medical records kept by the insurer to Microsoft’s HealthVault, a portable online health-record system. The information in question includes claims, diagnoses, test results and prescriptions. [Source: WSJ Health Blog] Health Care...
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- Helicos BioScience is Losing the $1000 Genome Race
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- In Lean Times, 23 and Me Pays $4M to a Company Officer. Why?
- Repealing the Health-Insurance Antitrust Exemption: a Catchy But Useless Idea
- Why Doctors Still Don't Use Electronic Medical Records, Part XXI: Terrible Tech Support
- Obama's Healthcare Reform Summit: A Show to Stiffen Democratic Spines
- Screw Jane Hamsher: Pass the Healthcare Reform Bill
- Health Spending Hits 17.3 Percent of GDP In Largest Annual Jump
- If Healthcare Reform Fails: Fewer Well-Insured Patients Will Leave Doctors Hurting
- Mayo Clinic Bridles at Medicare Payments
- Massachusetts Flirts With Healthcare Price Controls -- a Bad Idea, If an Understandable One
- Why Republican Healthcare-Reform Proposals Fall Short -- Way Short
- Doctors to Feds: Take Your Electronic-Record Subsidies and Shove 'Em
- Health Reform Looks Uncertain as Prominent Dems Shift Positions
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