Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
Federal Health Policy Update for June 12
The following is the latest health policy news from the federal government for June 6-12. Some of the language used below is taken directly from government documents. Congress Republican senators continue to work on their version of a reconciliation bill with a goal of passage by July 4, although that deadline may slip. Some Senate committees have begun releasing their portions of the bill but the Finance Committee’s bill, with its tax and Medicaid provisions, has not yet been released. Among the majority party in the Senate, fault lines around [...]
HHS Releases Proposed Budget
The Department of Health and Human Services has released a new, expanded version of its proposed FY 2026 budget. In some areas this version provides more detail than the administration shared in early May when it released a so-called “skinny budget” and some aspects of the budget proposal differ from the May release. Highlights of the most recent proposal include: A reduction of 25 percent, from $126 billion to $94.7 billion, in HHS’s overall discretionary (non-mandatory) spending. The consolidation of HHS’s 28 current operating divisions into 15 divisions. A reduction [...]
Administration Targets State Directed Medicaid Payments
The White House has issued a presidential memorandum on “Eliminating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Medicaid” that cites Medicaid “state-directed payments” as a form of waste, fraud, and abuse. According to the memorandum, states use state directed payments to pay more than Medicare rates for some Medicaid-covered services – something the memorandum suggests is contrary to current practice because “…billable costs for such care were historically capped at the same level that healthcare providers could receive from Medicare.” This assertion comes despite a 2024 regulation that set the payment limit [...]
CMS Charts Medicare’s Tech Future
In the wake of issuing a request for information asking stakeholders how the agency can better serve Medicare beneficiaries, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has begun charting its future use of technology by laying out some of the objectives of such an undertaking. In a recent news release, CMS identified the following objectives: Building a dynamic, interoperable national provider directory. Bringing modern identity verification processes to Medicare.gov to streamline credentials across the healthcare system. Expanding functionality of CMS’ Blue Button 2.0 patient access application programming interface (API). Transitioning CMS’s [...]
Hospital Charity Care, Debt Collection Practices Vary
An analysis of the charity care policies of 2500 hospitals found considerable variation in their practices and in their efforts to collect unpaid bills. According to a review by the Lown Institute, most hospitals offer charity care but the income thresholds for qualifying for such assistance vary widely from hospital to hospital, from as low as household income of 100 percent of the federal poverty level to as much as 600 percent of the federal poverty level. Those standards vary, moreover, even in the same community, with neighboring hospitals sometimes [...]