Bulletin Board
Bulletin Board
Comfort, Not Quality, Woos Patients
People are more likely to recommend a hospital based on the comfort they felt when hospitalized rather than on the quality of the care they received, a new study has found. Good food, rooms with a view, friendly nurses, peace and quiet, more television channels, and other amenities impress patients more than higher survival rates and lower hospital-acquired conditions rates. These are among the findings from an analysis of patient satisfaction data from 3000 hospitals between 2007 and 2010. Learn more about how inpatients view their hospital experiences and how [...]
Number of Medicare-Dependent Hospitals Declines
The number of Medicare-dependent hospitals in the U.S. fell 28 percent between 2011 and 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reports. Medicare-dependent hospitals receive additional payments from Medicare if at least 60 percent of their discharges or inpatient days are associated with Medicare patients, if they have 100 or fewer beds, and if their historic costs in one of three base years are greater than what they would have been paid through Medicare’s inpatient prospective payment system. The Medicare-dependent program was created in 1989 to protect vulnerable small, mostly rural [...]
MFAR Backlash Continues
Diverse health care and government interests are rallying around their opposition to the proposed Medicaid fiscal accountability rule. The regulation, proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in November, would impose new limits on the ability of states to finance their share of their Medicaid spending, potentially jeopardizing provider payments and the ability of high-volume Medicaid providers to operate without suffering great losses. In all, CMS received more than 4200 written comments in response to the proposed regulation, most of them expressing opposition. Among those doing so were [...]
Azar: Budget Proposes Reducing Medicaid Matching $
The federal government would reduce its financial commitment to state Medicaid programs under the FY 2021 budget the Trump administration proposed earlier this month. While testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar acknowledged that the administration’s proposed FY 2021 would eliminate the enhanced rate at which the federal government matches state funds used to serve individuals who enrolled in Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion provision. That enhanced rate calls for the federal [...]
CMS to Look at Accrediting Agencies
Health care accrediting organizations will be the subject of scrutiny and possible action by the federal government in the coming months. At a recent conference, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Seem Verma said that Receiving CMS’s authorization to inspect and deem healthcare providers compliant with Medicare’s quality standards is nothing short of assuming a sacred public trust…But an increasing amount of evidence indicates that accrediting organizations are not living up to that high bar. According to Verma, CMS’s interest is motivated by a number of recent incidents of [...]