The importance of the AMA’s endorsement of the House of Representatives’ health reform bill should not be minimized. The AMA has been fighting government efforts to establish universal coverage at least since the 1930s, when the AMA’s opposition discouraged F.D.R. from pursuing reform on that front. While it’s true that the AMA represents a far smaller percentage of physicians than in...
Health Care Industry Archive
July 2009
The Health IT Policy Committee, which advises the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has adopted the revised recommendations of its workgroup on the “meaningful use” of electronic health records. Physicians will have to show meaningful use to qualify for government financial incentives that are scheduled to start flowing in 2011. The revised definition is apparently more lenient...
Healthcare Leaders Are Nervous – A broad cross-section of healthcare companies, including hospitals, physician groups, pharmaceutical firms, and device makers, plus a few insurance companies, sent the Congressional leadership a letter begging them to take a centrist stance on healthcare reform. The 42 members of the Healthcare Leadership Council asked Congress to pass a bill that would...
The House Democrats unveiled their full reform proposal today, and not a moment too soon. I say that not because of President Obama’s deadline of having both houses of Congress pass bills before the August break. I say it because all the signs point to a continuing breakdown of the healthcare system. Just in the past week, for instance, it was reported that emergency rooms and community...
AMA and Sermo have parted ways only two years after the AMA lent its name and credibility to the startup company in return for gaining access to its social networking site. The well-publicized breakup has a couple of interesting subtexts. Let’s start with the double standard of Sermo founder and CEO Daniel Palestrant, MD. While assailing the AMA for selling its CPT codes to insurance...
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has launched another attack on the problem of the nation’s appalling readmission rate—about 20 percent of all Medicare discharges—by posting the readmission rates of hospitals that report data to the agency on its Hospital Compare website. More than 4,000 hospitals, including most acute-care facilities, voluntarily submit quality...
The industry players are bargaining with the Obama Administration for financial deals in return for their qualified support of whatever reform legislation comes out of Congress. First, it was the pharmaceutical industry, which promised $80 billion in lower costs over 10 years—mainly to help seniors who wind up in the “doughnut hole” of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Now, the...
As Congress faces America’s healthcare demons again, I have the honor of hosting this biweekly review of some of America’s best healthcare bloggers. They include Joe Paduda of Managed Care Matters, who helms a subsection of this Health Wonk Review devoted to initial reactions to Bob Laszewski’s unusual reform proposal. That mini-section follows the main body of HWR. Our first topic is the...
As healthcare becomes more expensive, self-insured employers are ratcheting up the pressure on physicians by hiring outside collection firms to dun them for what the employers claim are past overpayments. Physicians are angry about these ex post facto demands, which often concern claims that were paid years ago, and they have enlisted their medical societies to fight the companies that are...
What if financial incentives for providers, insurers, employers and consumers were the starting point of reform? The healthcare consultant and health policy expert Bob Laszewski has thought deeply about the answer to that question and come up with a unique reform plan he calls the Health Care Affordability Model. In a nutshell, Laszewski is proposing that if a health plan cannot keep its annual...
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